PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE 


PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE 


HISTORIC  PSYCHOLOGY 


BY 


WILLIAM   MORTON   FULLERTON 


AUTHOR   OF   "IN   CAIRO 


BOSTON 

ROBERTS  BROTHERS 
1893 


Copyright,  1898, 
BY  ROBERTS  BROTHERS. 


: 

JOHN  WILSON  AND  SON,  CAMBRIDGE,  U.S.A. 


€o  mp  father, 

On  whose  library-shelves  the  sight  of  Plato  touching  shoulders 
with  John  Howe  the  Puritan  preacher,  and  of  the  poet  Shelley 
enduring  with  unwonted  tranquillity  his  two  odd  companions  on 
either  hand,  Balzac  and  the  author  of  the  "Divine  Legation  of 
Moses"  while  just  beyond  stood  Lucretius,  the  "Thousand  and 
One  Nights"  and  Adam  Smith,  suggested  to  me,  the  hoy,  the 
value  of  the  social  virtue  of  tolerance,  and,  although  it  impressed 
at  first  the  special  charm  of  literature,  suggested  without  much 
ado  the  larger  interest  of  life. 


NOTICE. 

Two  of  the  following  essays  appeared  origin- 
ally in  the  Fortnightly  Review.  They  have  since 
been  revised,  and  are  now  published  together 
under  the  title  "  English  and  'Americans.' "  The 
other  attempts  at  appreciation  of  the  Time  have 
not  before  been  printed.  The  dates  affixed  to 
the  two  former  are  those  of  publication. 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 

ON  A  CERTAIN  DANGER   IN  PATRIOTISM   AT  THE 
PRESENT  TIME 13 

ENGLISH   ANff™~AOTHHttAJJ|" 59 

DEMOORACT;~WITH"  EETERmraB-r^-A.,  .RECENT  BOOK.    117 


ON  A  CERTAIN  DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM 
AT  THE  PRESENT  TIME. 


PATEIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 


ON  A  CEETAIN  DANGEE  IN  PATEIOTISM 
AT  THE  PEESENT  TIME. 

THE  word  is  by  way  of  being  pedantic,  but  how 
little  can  one  help  wishing  at  times  for  a  whole  planet 
of  "  philosophers ;  "  for  although  "  philosophy  can 
bake  no  bread,"  and  although  there  may  be  much 
doubt  whether  it  can  "give  us  God,  Freedom,  and 
Immortality,"  yet  unquestionably,  without  that  im- 
pulse to  comparing  one  thing  with  another  which 
results  in  a  kind  of  liking  for  the  condition  of  detach- 
ment from  each  special  fact  known  to  us, —  a  state 
usually  reached  by  a  widely  awakened  man  in  the 
world,  and  one  which  deserves  to  be  known  as  philoso- 
phic, —  there  is  the  risk  that  we  all,  rendered  clan- 
nish by  our  confinement  within  particular  geographical 
barriers,  or  limited,  perchance,  by  kinship  of  race, 
may  lose  positive  insights  of  value  in  regard  to  other 
respectable,  even  interesting,  sections  of  our  human 
fellows,  not  to  speak  of  the  loss  of  those  superior 


14  PATRIOTISM   AND    SCIENCE. 

pleasures  that  attend  this  "  philosophic  "  detached  con- 
dition, the  somewhat  general,  the  so-called  cosmopoli- 
tan, or  even  the  cosmical,  way  of  looking  at  things. 

Thus,  for  instance,  a  number  of  those  especially 
English  'qualities,  so  mixed  of  unlike  elements  as 
almost  to  demand  a  suicidal  phrase  in  description  of 
them,  such  a  phrase,  perhaps,  as  odious  merits,  —  all 
those  qualities,  I  mean,  which  have  been  frequently 
so  very  obtrusive  in  the  contact  of  the  English  people 
with  others  in  the  recent  eight  hundred  years,  over 
seas  as  well  as  in  the  English  island,  become,  by  reason 
of  the  coagulating  clannish  drift  in  human  nature,  un- 
fortunately contrasted  with  what,  in  the  same  general 
way,  I  may  be  allowed  to  call  the  amiable  defects  of 
the  French;  for  by  qualities  permitting  such  euphe- 
mistic description  the  French  have  usually  been  known 
to  the  great  practical,  unimaginative  "  Saxon  "  world. 

The  result  of  the  contrast  between  the  amiable  de- 
fects and  the  odious  merits  has  been  a  long  story 
of  mutual  misunderstanding.  To  disinterested  critics 
of  the  two  peoples  this  misunderstanding  is  almost 
pathetic,  and  to  the  gods  —  of  whom,  surely,  a  spirit 
of  poetic  justice  still  demands  our  pious  recognition  — 
it  must  be  ironic.  An  approximately  disinterested 
observer,  —  for  this  is  all  that  any  one  of  us  can  hope 
to  be, —  seeking  to  avoid,  with  equal  caution,  unscien- 
tific laudation  and  unscientific  depreciation  of  both 


ON  A   CERTAIN  DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        17 

planet,  and  even  become  so  chronic   that   there  will 
seem  to  be  positively  no  cure. 

I  chanced  not  long  ago  upon  an  article  in  the  Con- 
temporary Review,1  by  a  Mr.  Edward  Wakefield,  on  so 
enticing  a  theme  that  I  promptly  bought  the  number 
and  read  the  article,  — "  The  Brand  of  Cain  in  the 
Great  Eepublic ;  "  and  I  read  it,  if  not  with  pleasure, 
at  least  with  entertainment.  It  came  to  me,  at  the 
time,  as  so  happy  an  instance  of  the  sort  of  thing 
which  may  be  called  internationally  unfortunate,  the 
fact  that  not  all  men  can  claim  pretensions  in  a  way 
to  being  "  philosophers, "  wisdom-loving,  —  to  liking,  I 
mean,  to  find  out  the  truth  for  its  own  sake,  irrespec- 
tive of  the  consequences,  in  an  honest,  scientific 
fashion.  For  this  article  was  one  of  those  plausible 
but  unsatisfactory  things  which  we  all  of  us  are  sure  to 
produce  if  we  have  not  the  leaven  of  criticism  to  tem- 
per the  utterances  made  by  us  in  that  needlessly  aver- 
age state  of  ignorance  of  others  that  so  surely  results 
in  uncompromising  patriotism.  But  patriotism  is  so 
little  laudable  in  itself  that  it  appears  to  me  to  be  posi- 
tively vulgarizing  and  repressing  if  it  be  treasured  at 
the  expense  of  the  critical  wider  view,  or,  as  M.  le 
Vicomte  de  Vogue  says,  the  "  passion  for  the  planet,"  — • 
a  passion  which  reveals  many  relatively  admirable 
things  everywhere  about  us,  even  among  other  peoples 
1  November,  1891. 
2 


18  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

than  our  own,  and  shows  us  that  the  humanized  temper 
named  cosmopolitism  —  I  wish  there  were  an  exacter 
word  —  brings  its  reward  as  well  as  the  Anglo-Hebraic 
thing  called  patriotism.  So  that  when  this  Mr.  Wake- 
field,  in  the  not  unnatural  way  of  the  English  of  the 
island, — although  he  wrote  entertainingly  and  admira- 
bly to  the  point,  as  a  lawyer  preparing  a  brief, — recorded 
in  quick  succession  instance  after  instance  of  Ameri- 
can love  for  the  "smell  of  blood"  (he  found  this 
phrase  in  a  poem  of  the  late  Mr.  Lowell,  and  made 
effective  use  of  it),  I,  although  I  listened,  could  not 
help  immediately  putting  him  down  on  the  list  of 
those  admirable  patriotic  writers  who  clearly  deserve 
pensions  and  button-hole  ribbons  from  their  states, 
but  who  cannot  be  classed  among  the  critics  of  the 
finer  breed,  whose  country's  boundaries,  not  for  practi- 
cal social  purposes,  but  for  the  responsible  exactions 
of  authorship,  is  somewhat  wider  than  that,  at  least, 
of  their  native  state.  For  here  is  what  Mr.  Wakefield 
wrote :  — 

"  The  Americans  take  a  most  curious  view  of  this  kind 
of  killing.  [He  refers  to  homicides.]  They  consider  [sic] 
that  any  man  may  rightly  shoot  another  from  whom  he 
thinks  himself  in  danger  of  a  blow  or  any  hurt,  or  even 
from  whom  he  has  had  bad  words." 

Then  again :  — 

"  In  all  ranks  of  society,  even  in  New  York  and  Phila- 
delphia, men  are  to  be  met  with  who  have  taken  life,  who 


ON   A   CERTAIN  DANGER  TN   PATRIOTISM.        19 

are  not  ashamed  of  themselves  for  it,  and  whose  friends  are 
not  ashamed  of  them  either." 

And  once  more :  — 

"  Boys,  and  even  women,  quite  commonly  take  the  life  of 
a  fellow-creature  in  the  United  States,  and  if  'provoca- 
tion '  or  any  strong  emotion  can  be  shown,  it  is  thought 
rather  creditable  to  them  than  otherwise." 

Quite  commonly,  and  rather  creditable  to  them 
than  otherwise  !  And  Mr.  Wakefield  uses  the  word 
"  Americans, "  which  is  inclusive.  But  still  one  more 
quotation :  — 

"  It  will  doubtless  shock  and  surprise  worthy  people  in 
England,  who  do  not  know  much  about  America,  to  hear 
that  burning  alive  is  practised  in  that  free  and  enlightened 
country  a  century  after  it  has  been  abandoned  in  Spain 
and  Italy." 

Really,  in  the  face  of  so  terrible  an  indictment,  and 
if  the  "  Americans  "  be  so  hopelessly,  reekingly  red- 
handed  as  all  this,  what  can  we  all  be  but  pessimists 
in  regard  to  democracy,  pessimists  of  the  darkest 
shade?  Where  is  there  for  us  any  hope?  And  if 
what  Mr.  Wakefield  says  be  true,  the  title  of  his 
article,  so  successfully  reproducing  the  inimitable  char- 
acteristics of  the  headlines  of  the  journals  of  this  detes- 
table United  States  of  North  America,  deserves  for  its 
achievements  in  what  is  frequently  known  as  "  local 
colour,"  considerable  praise.  But,  seriously,  imagine 


20  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

the  late  Walter  Bagehot,  or  M.  Boutmy  to-day  in 
France,  writing  like  this!  Imagine  these  gentlemen 
pointing  out  a  number  of  lamentable  facts  in  regard  to 
life  in  the  United  States  of  North  America,  and  then 
making  of  such  facts  so  little  critical  use  as  to  set  down 
in  responsible  but  corrupting  black  type  on  virginal 
white  paper  the  unqualified  assertions  about  "  boys,  and 
even  women, "  who  "  quite  commonly  "  indulge  in  the 
extremely  unsociable  acts  named,  and  about  the  "  prac- 
tice "  of  "  burning  alive  "  rivalling  in  its  painful  fea- 
tures the  supposed  customs  of  Spain  and  Italy  a  cen- 
tury ago.  Imagine  them  collecting  these  instances, 
and  not  arranging  such  instances  in  their  proper 
places,  in  that  correct  perspective  so  dear  to  the  scien- 
tist ;  not,  for  example,  —  to  name  but  one  kind  of  ob- 
vious reservation,  —  assuring  their  readers  that  while 
every  one  of  the  odious  events  recorded  could  often 
be  paralleled  in  this  land  of  individual  assertion, —  the 
sort  of  thing,  says  Mr.  Wakefield,  that  the  Americans 
like  in  women,  and  dub  an  "  excitable  temperament, " 
—  the  only  possible  light  in  which  his  discussion  can  be 
seen  to  be  of  any  value  is  had  when  a  comparison 
is  drawn  between,  on  the  one  side,  the  habits  of  these 
.enormously-diffused  and  red-handed  people  of  the 
United  States  of  North  America,  and,  on  the  other,  the 
conduct  of  the  peoples  of  the  United  Kingdom  (and 
it  is  unfortunate  for  him  that  this  name  includes  the 


ON  A  CERTAIN  DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM.        21 

Ireland  of  the  last  ten  years),  of  the  whole  of  Europe, 
and  even  of  a  part  of  Asia  as  well.  For  the  commu- 
nity of  the  United  States  of  North  America  is  a  very 
varied  one;  it  is  scattered  over  what  the  majority  of 
its  members  are  always  apt  to  assert  loudly  is  the 
greatest  country  in  the  world,  and  it  is  moreover  a 
collection  of  almost  autonomous  states,  somewhat  simi- 
lar, in  this  respect  of  decentralization,  to  the  political 
relations  of  the  people  of  Greek  cantoris  in  their  brief 
periods  of  confederation,  —  a  fact  of  which,  however,  I 
would  not  do  Mr.  Wakefield  the  injustice  to  deny  that 
he  is  aware.  But  in  failing  to  point  out  this  much  of 
the  whole  and  real  bearing  of  his  unimpeachable  facts, 
and  therefore  of  others  like  them,  Mr.  Wakefield's 
entertaining  article  became  comparatively  valueless, 
without  useful  point.  I  have  paid  to  it  almost  unfair 
attention.  I  cite  these  passages  only  as  an  illustration 
of  the  unsatisfactory  results  we  are  all  apt  to  produce 
if  we  write  as  patriots  rather  than  as  critics,  and  of 
the  loss  of  positive  insights  that  we  suffer  if  we  come 
at  relative  things  like  ourselves  and  our  neighbours  in 
so  uncritical  a  mood. 

So  again,  indeed,  may  the  same  thing  be  seen  in 
the  relations  of  us  Scotch  and  English,  wherever  we 
may  have  been  born,  with  the  not  very  colonizing 
French.  The  English,  with  their  one  great  idea,  their 
love  for  institutions,  a  love  however  which  is  no 


22  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

passion,  but  with  their  dogged  grip  of  this,  and  with 
their  practical  honesty,  and  their  extraordinary  energy, 
cannot  be  expected  in  general  to  see  great  virtue  in  a 
people  who,  like  the  French,  really  think  spontane- 
ously, and  who  think  so  much  that  their  thinking 
would  seem  to  have  tended  to  stunt  the  race  physi- 
cally, the  energy  being  devoted  to  the  elaboration  of 
the  folded  gray  matter  in  the  brain  rather  than  to  the 
rounding  of  muscles  and  the  reddening  of  cheeks ;  and 
when  these  French  people  not  only  think,  but  often 
put  their  thinking  violently,  indecorously  into  action, 
how  can  the  English  be  blamed  for  having  their  peculiar 
opinion  in  regard  to  French  lack  of  self-control,  and 
French  childishness  and  caprice  ?  Blamed  for  inevi- 
table opinions?  Human  nature,  at  the  hands  of  the 
critic,  at  least,  never  need  suffer  this  injustice.  But 
when  it  is  remembered  that  what  is  censured  thus  in 
the  opinion  of  Englishmen  are  the  frequently  intolerable 
results  arising  from  the  possession  by  Frenchmen  of 
certain  things  of  which  Englishmen  have  so  little,  but 
without  which  undoubtedly,  however,  one  must  ad- 
mit that  they  have  got  on  extremely  well,  the  censure, 
while  intelligible,  may  be  appreciated  at  its  worth. 
The  censure  receives  its  proper  interpretation  as  a 
failure  to  understand,  whereas  corresponding  censure 
of  Englishmen  by  Frenchmen  has  almost  always 
tended  to  be  more  critical.  It  has  usually  been  this 


ON  A   CERTAIN   DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM.        23 

English  failure  to  understand  which  has  created  the 
antipathy  that  England  has  felt  with  reference  to 
France.  But  ignorant  sneer  on  the  one  side  has  been 
met  on  the  other  by  supercilious  disdain.  It  is  con- 
ceivable that  some  one  might  argue  that  the  antipathy 
is  rather  an  international  hostility  of  peoples  that 
have  often  met  perforce  of  geographical  accidents  on 
the  field  of  battle;  that  the  English,  for  instance, 
never  can  forget  that  once  upon  a  time  their  Edward 
III.  was  repulsed  before  the  clock-towers  of  Chartres 
in  the  green  meadows  of  the  Beauce,  and  the  French 
that  the  beau  pays  was  cut  and  desolated  by  the 
horse-hoofs  of  the  English  Plantagenets ;  France  that 
she  lost  an  empire  in  America  and  in  India,  and  that 
to-day  the  valley  of  the  Kile,  whose  unspeakable  charm 
French  men,  more  than  any  other  men,  have  rendered 
intelligible  and  seductive  throughout  the  world,  is 
becoming  only  one  more  play-ground  for  a  mastering 
race  who  love,  better  than  the  tombs  of  Ti,  the  fine 
game  of  polo,  and  who  dress  in  scarlet  uniforms  with- 
in sight  of  the  abashed  eyelids  of  the  Sphinx.  All 
this  has  its  force  undoubtedly.  But  even  these  not- 
able achievements  of  English  energy  are  not  the  things 
that  have  done  the  most  to  cleave  the  gulf :  the  Eng- 
lish recall  them  only  as  one  more  evidence  of  their 
divine  right  as  the  chosen  people,  and  of  the  clear 
proof  of  French  inferiority;  the  French  remember 


24  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

them  as  proof  that  in  all  the  assumption  of  comparison 
in  regard  to  physical  prowess  and  the  great  tenacious 
virtues  perhaps  the  English  are  right;  but  they  half 
learn  the  lesson  —  and  this  is  a  great  merit  —  that  their 
own  distinction,  which  is  of  quite  another  order, 
should  not  be  lightly  esteemed.  The  antipathy  that 
exists  is,  I  repeat,  the  duel  of  uncomprehending  sneer 
and  of  supercilious  disdain.  And  what  the  French 
in  their  more  analysing,  critical  way  lay  up  against  the 
English,  and  find  infinite  difficulty  in  forgetting,  are 
incidents  of  a  very  different  sort. 

Now,  all  this  crude,  uncritical  feeling  is  surely  a 
great  mistake.  It  certainly  stands  full  in  the  way  of 
one  of  the  things  for  which  we  all  ought  to  strive,  —  a 
completer  knowledge  of  what  other  men  have  done 
everywhere  in  the  world,  without  distinction  of  blood 
or  home;  and  the  cultivating  of  a  loud-mouthed  pa- 
triotism, for  its  own  sake  as  an  end,  would  seem  to 
retard  the  comity  between  the  nations  which  certainly 
might  bring  us  now  other  incalculable  advantages 
perhaps  quite  as  good  as  those  that,  as  we  are  told, 
patriotism  alone  can  offer  us. 

I  have  said  "  might  bring  us. "  But  I  should  very 
much  regret  giving  an  impression  that  I  am  unaware 
of  what  a  great  virtue  patriotism  has  been  in  the 
world,  and  still  is.  When  one  thinks  of  Greece,  when 
one  thinks  of  Eome,  when  one  thinks  of  Israel,  when 


ON  A   CERTAIN   DANGER   IN   PATRIOTISM.         25 

one  thinks  of  New  England,  what  first  comes  to  the 
mind  of  us  all, —  no,  what  first  comes  to  the  mind  even 
especially  of  the  average  among  us  who  are  not 
scholars,  and  do  not  know  these  places  in  all  the  in- 
complete detail  of  their  history,  —  if  it  is  not  the  com- 
pactness of  these  peoples,  their  aggressiveness,  their 
unity,  their  national  consciousness,  their  common 
pride,  and  their  devotion  to  the  often  narrow  but 
always  definite  and  tangible  ideals  of  their  own  na- 
tional temperament, — in  a  word,  their  patriotism  ?  And 
in  contrast  to  all  this,  what  I  will  not  ask  is  the 
common  opinion  held  of  men  who  have  betrayed  their 
countries,  but  what  do  the  professional  historians  in- 
sist on  telling  us  about  these  very  same  peoples  when 
these  writers  enter  curiously  into  an  analysis  of  the 
causes  of  their  disintegration  or  their  fall,  if  at  the 
most  all  that  they  say  may  not  be  summed  up  in  the 
assertion  that  when  matters  became  so  shockingly  bad 
it  was  because  the  old  feeling  of  patriotism  no  longer 
stirred  men's  minds  as  in  the  periods  of  "  glorious 
unity  "  and  livelier  self-consciousness  1  But  while 
patriotism  seems  to  have  been  hitherto  a  name  for  the 
great  unifying  impulse  that  made  peoples,  although  not 
necessarily  amiable,  yet  strong;  and  although  the  ab- 
sence of  it  may  now  and  then  be  a  positive  social  crime, 
like  treason,  or  regicide,  or  what  you  will  of  the  same 
sort,  it  is  conceivable  that  at  other  times  and  in  quite 


26  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

other  conditions  its  virtue  may  not  appear  so  obvious, 
but  may  even  positively  evaporate.  For  patriotism  has 
up  to  our  century  served  its  place  in  history  not, 
surely  everybody  will  admit,  as  a  necessarily  demon- 
strable good  in  itself,  but  as  a  good  only  because  it 
served  other  ends  which  for  men,  at  each  time  when 
it  has  been  so  rife,  were  clearly  demonstrable  goods, 
if  they  themselves  were  to  live  at  all  in  any  sort  of 
ordered  way.  But  suppose  that  a  time  arrive  in 
which  the  end  sought  to  be  obtained  by  the  cultiva- 
tion of  the  mood  and  the  duty  of  patriotism  is  no 
longer  so  important  as  before ;  when  not  merely  it  is 
no  longer  necessary  that  men  should  be  kept  asunder 
for  their  own  collective  or  individual  good,  but  also 
indeed  very  important  that  they  should,  on  the  other 
hand,  be  brought  quickly  closer  and  closer  together, 
in  order  that  they  may  not  be  slow  in  accepting  and 
appreciating  the  multitudinous  hints  and  suggestions 
of  a  great  fresh  mechanical  century  like  our  own, 
with  railroads  and  telegraphs  and  all  that, —  then  surely 
something  of  the  glory  that  hangs  about  the  word 
patriotism  would  begin  to  fade.  Can  one  not  imagine 
even  the  possibility  of  "cosmopolitism"  exciting  in 
these  circumstances  an  equally  virtuous  passion?  Is 
it  even  positively  irreligious  to  conceive  an  era  of  in- 
ternational comity  when  the  epitaph,  "  He  died  for  his 
country,"  may  arouse  in  the  mind  of  the  spectator 


ON  A  CERTAIN   DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        27 

rather  a  thought  of  pity  for  the  poor  fellow  permitted 
thus  by  his  rather  barbaric,  rather  uncritical  neigh- 
bours to  be  a  victim  of  such  an  absurd  necessity,  than 
of  unmixed  admiration  for  any  inimitable  heroism 
enshrined  in  the  phrase? 

Well,  it  appears  to  me  that  into  such  a  time  as  this 
men  are  now  entering,  though  we  ourselves  are  pretty 
certain  not  to  see  it ;  but  at  all  events  patriotism  is  not 
at  all  the  thing  it  was.  And  while  for  a  good,  or  bad , 
time  longer  some  of  men's  highest  devotions  will  still 
cling  to  this  ideal,  there  is  the  sign  of  the  change. 
Yet  the  lack  of  prejudice  and  the  unwillingness  to 
censure  such  hitherto  odious  proverbs  as  Ubi  bene,  ibi 
patria,  and  the  utter  disappearance  of  those  sec- 
tional and  national  prejudices  that  made  Beranger 
once  so  absorbing,  and  Jacob's  Ode  on  Privilege  so 
magnificent,  so  picturesque,  and  makes  to-day  some 
of  our  patriotic  verse  so  unpoetical,  like  the  loud 
cracking  in  the  wind  of  a  stiffly  starched  national 
flag, —  while  these  various  dreams,  I  say,  remain  still 
unfulfilled,  and  as  they  are  sure  to  remain  unfulfilled 
so  long,  there  can  be  no  danger  even  of  a  little  exag- 
geration in  one's  utterance  as  to  the  merits  of  even 
other  peoples  than  one's  own.  Proper  criticism  can 
thereby  only  be  helped,  and  we  shall  certainly  be  sure 
of  not  in  any  way  retarding  the  stream  of  tendency. 

It  is  the  more  needful,  moreover,  that  this  or  that 


28  PATRIOTISM   AND   SCIENCE. 

one  of  us  who  finds  himself  at  liberty  to  speak  should 
not  resist  the  interpretation  of  the  time,  that  the  very 
things  which  are  making  such  inroads  on  patriotism, 
—  namely,  all  those  forces  which  are  magically  reducing 
the  earth's  circumference,  —  will  undoubtedly,  still  for 
some  time  longer,  have  locally  quite  the  opposite  effect, 
and  will  make  men  think  more  about  the  things 
within  their  own  most  limited  horizon  even  than  they 
did  before.  For  it  is  these  very  forces  which  are  now 
drawing  together  the  inquisitive  world,  and  which  will 
eventually  draw  together  the  whole  world,  that  are 
waking  up  men,  and  suggesting  to  them  new  problems, 
and  worrying  them  terribly  to-day  with  apparently  all 
but  insoluble  questions.  This  is  why,  whether  we 
like  it  or  dislike  it,  or  whether  we  ought  to  like  it  or 
dislike  it,  patriotism  will  still  have  its  ample  field, 
and  may  reap  its  legitimate  glorious  rewards. 

Take  such  an  event  as  happened  the  other  day 
in  France  in  connection  with  the  question  always  so 
important  there  of  the  relations  between  church  and 
state,  when  an  archbishop,  a  certain  Monseigneur 
Gouthe-Soulard,  refused  to  accept  loyally  the  repub- 
lican regime,  and  in  very  irresponsible  ways  lent  the 
force  of  his  great  parochial  authority  to  strengthening 
the  various  local  elements  of  resistance  and  obstruc- 
tion, one  might  almost  say  of  sedition,  against  the 
whole  idea  of  the  present  republican  government. 


ON  A  CERTAIN  DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        29 

The  incident  was  really  so  interesting  that  I  think  it 

m 
important  to  refer  to  it  at  some  length ;  it  happened  in 

this  fashion. 

Every  one  knows  how  the  power  of  the  Pope  in  xv 
temporal  things  has  been,  for  the  moment,  curtailed 
throughout  the  world;  how  in  Home,  the  city  of  the 
Holy  Father,  if  it  be  remembered  how  glorious  that 
condition  once  was,  his  condition  may  really,  after  all, 
be  said  to  be  to-day  what  the  faithful  are  always  as- 
serting it  to  be, —  almost  that  of  a  prisoner  in  a  palace; 
and  every  one  can  understand  how  the  loyal  host  of  the 
clergy,  "  vicars  of  Christ, "  often  chafe  against  this 
state  of  things,  and  regard  it  as  something  to  be 
changed  at  any  cost.  So  it  is  not  incomprehensible 
that  much  activity  should  be  expended  in  recovering 
the  former  majesty  and  dominance,  and,  to  those  who 
know  France,  that  special  energy  of  this  kind  should 
emanate  from  there.  For  just  as  in  China  at  the 
present  moment  all  Chinese  gentlemen  of  good  birth 
are  unable  to  conceive  how  they  can  be  at  once  China- 
men and  Christians,  missionaries  and  all  that  being 
to  them  only  the  advance  guard  of  the  European 
civilization  which  undermines  their  own,  so  that  it 
appears  to  them  complete  disloyalty,  absolute  anti- 
patriotism  in  a  purely  political  sense,  to  accept  the 
strenuous  notions  of  the  foreigner,  —  so  in  France,  now 
for  many  years,  to  be  a  republican,  to  accept  the 


30  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

republican  regime,  has  been  to  many  really  like  an 
abjuration  before  men  of  Christianity  itself;  has  been 
almost,  indeed,  to  proclaim  oneself  an  atheist.  And 
it  was  the  monarchy,  and  only  the  monarchy,  which, 
it  has  been  widely  imagined,  cared  for  religion,  and 
in  particular  cared  for  the  Koman  Catholic  Church. 
It  is  not  necessary  now  to  consider  why  such  a 
notion  arose,  or  whether  it  was  well  or  ill  founded. 
I  need  point  out  only  that  it  was  very  rife,  and  still 
is  very  rife,1  notwithstanding  in  many  respects  its 
manifest  injustice  and  inaccuracy,  and  the  significant 
efforts  of  men  like  Cardinal  Lavigerie,  the  Bishop  of 
Annecy,  and  indeed  even  the  great  head  of  the  Church 
himself,  in  his  general  attitude  of  disapproval  of  war- 
like rebellious  methods,  to  stem  the  torrent.  So  with 
so  widespread  a  feeling  in  the  country  it  is  not  sur- 
prising that  Roman  Catholic  Christians,  a  little  hot- 

1  Since  these  lines  were  written,  indeed  only  within  the  last 
few  weeks,  there  has  been  a  great  change.  The  Pope,  Leo 
XIII.,  has  spoken  in  clear,  irritating  accents ;  he  has  recognized 
the  Republic ;  the  Comte  de  Mun,  former  leader  in  the  Chamber 
of  the  "  Royalist  right,"  has  abandoned  his  old  position ;  and 
all  along  the  line  there  is  hesitation  and  dismay.  For  France 
1892  is  the  most  memorable  year  since  the  war.  It  has  seen 
the  alliance  of  Russia  with  that  country,  and  the  Pope's  irre- 
vocable decision  to  accept  the  present  regime  as  established. 
France,  notwithstanding  the  scandal  of  Panama,  holds  in  the 
world  a  position  of  dignity  to-day  more  admirable  than  at  any 
other  time  in  its  history. 


ON  A  CERTAIN   DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM.        31 

headed,  and  owing  allegiance  first  to  their  faith,  should 
conceive  such  a  scheme  as  was  conceived  in  France. 
Pilgrimages,  called  pilgrimages  of  French  workmen, 
were  arranged,  and  some  twenty  thousand  of  these 
"  workmen "  were  despatched  to  Eome  with  the 
avowed  object  of  offering  to  the  Holy  Father  a  solid 
proof  of  the  undiminished  loyalty  of  France  to  the 
Holy  See.  Wise  men,  thinking  of  the  strained  rela- 
tions of  France  and  Italy  in  these  days  of  the  renewed 
Triple  Alliance;  thinking  of  the  friction  between 
Italy  and  the  Vatican ;  and  thinking  of  the  multitude 
of  latent  possibilities  of  something,  of  many  things, 
going  wrong,  when  twenty  thousand  foreigners  were 
suddenly  precipitated  in  such  circumstances  into  a 
foreign  capital, — were  greatly  troubled  at  the  prospect. 
But  the  Government,  though  it  had  the  chance  of 
wise  action,  and  was  as  alive  as  possible  to  the  danger, 
in  reality  said  nothing,  did  nothing.  It  overlooked, 
with  a  leniency  that  testified  to  its  real  dread  in  the 
whole  matter,  rather  than  to  a  firm  tactfulness,  several 
violations  of  the  Concordat  of  Napoleon, —  such,  for 
instance,  as  M.  Gouthe-Soulard's  going  at  all  to  Rome 
without  seeking  the  permission  of  the  Minister  of 
Public  Worship,  —  and  it  awaited  the  issue. 

The  issue  came,  not  as  big  with  complications,  for- 
tunately, as  might  have  been  the  case,  but  yet  serious. 
This  is  what  happened.  A  large  number  of  pilgrims 


32  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

went  one  day  to  the  Pantheon,  and  one  of  them  wrote 
in  what  may  be  called  the  visitors'  book,  next  to  the 
tomb  of  Victor  Emmanuel,  Vive  le  Pape  Roi.  The 
news  of  this  indiscretion,  soon  undistinguishable  from 
an  insult,  transpired  among  the  Roman  populace  as 
flames  move  among  things  combustible,  and  a  tumult 
arose,  and  some  hard  hitting  occurred,  and  some 
unfriendly  phrases  were  tossed  about.  At  the  head 
of  the  procession  had  been  carried  the  tricolour  of 
"France,  and  it  was  little  wonder  that,  the  explosion 
once  fired,  the  detonations  went  rolling  up  and  down 
through  Italy,  and  that  even  the  Italian  Government 
was  forced  to  take  notice,  and  to  ask  if  France  had 
not  been  very  indiscreet,  and  what  she  meant  by  such 
indiscretion.  So  French  diplomacy  stepped  in,  and 
there  were  apologies,  which  some  of  the  Catholics  of 
France  asserted  were  a  staining  and  a  humiliation  of 
the  flag,  and  what  might  have  become  a  very  serious 
affair  indeed  was  smoothed  over.  However,  lest 
there  should  be  something  further  of  the  same  sort, 
the  Minister  of  Public  Worship,  though  late  in  his 
intervention,  wrote  the  following  very  proper  letter  to 
the  bishops  and  archbishops  of  France :  — 

"  You  know  the  incidents  so  to  be  regretted  which  have 
just  occurred  at  Rome  during  the  pilgrimages  known  as 
pilgrimages  of  '  French  workmen.'  You  are  too  alive  to  the 
best  interests  of  the  nation  not  to  think,  with  me,  that  all 


ON  A   CERTAIN   DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM.        33 

the  authorities  of  the  country  ought  to  avoid  becoming 
compromised  in  demonstrations  which  may  easily  lose  their 
religious  character.  I  therefore  have  the  honour  to  invite 
you  to  abstain  for  the  moment  from  all  participation  in 
these  pilgrimages." 

Could  anything  have  been  more  admirably  proper  1 
And  this  was  the  language  of  the  secular  superior  of 
all  the  ecclesiastical  functionaries  of  France,  —  a  man 
who  certainly  had  the  right  to  command  compliance 
in  all  the  interests  of  patriotism.  In  this  spirit,  it  is 
gratifying  to  record,  it  was  received  everywhere.  But 
this  Monseigneur  Gouthe-Soulard  chose  to  take  it 
quite  otherwise,  and  wrote  a  letter  in  reply  which, 
considering  all  the  circumstances,  —  such  things,  that 
is,  as  the  difficulty  the  republican  government,  which 
is  undoubtedly  now  the  only  form  suitable  to  the 
modern  France,  has  always  found  in  inspiring  respect 
among  monarchists  of  an  impossible  loyalty,  and  the 
way  the  Church  has  been  always  unnecessarily  mixed 
up  in  this  dissension;  such  things  as  that  he  himself 
owed  his  place  to  the  present  administration;  such 
things  as  that  by  putting  spokes  in  the  wheels  of  the 
government  in  thus  breaking  its  laws,  he  retarded 
greatly,  by  reason  of  his  high  influence,  the  desirable 
end  of  pacification,  and  the  impression  of  dignity  and 
solidity  so  important  for  France  to  give  to  the  world 
if  it  would  regain  its  political  eminence  among  the 

3 


34  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

Great  Powers,  —  considering  all  this  sort  of  thing,  I 
say,  Monseigneur  Gouthe-Soulard's  letter,  rehearsing 
false  histories  of  republican  persecution,  and  denying 
much  too  vivaciously  the  authority  of  the  government, 
and  thus  by  implication  the  duty  of  all  men  to  keep 
the  laws  of  the  land,  was  one  of  the  most  unpatriotic 
documents  ever  produced.  I  would  wish  to  print  this 
letter  intact,  and  the  record  of  subsequent  events,  in- 
cluding the  archbishop's  defence  at  his  trial,  and  the 
able  review  of  the  case  made  by  M.  Beaurepaire,  the 
Procureur-General,  for  the  entire  incident  is  of  in- 
terest; but  it  is  not  necessary  to  devote  more  space 
to  what  is,  after  all,  for  me  now  only  an  illustration. 
The  archbishop's  whole  conception  of  his  duty  was 
very  inadequate,  and  he  and  those  who  went  with 
him  in  his  defence  were  wanting  in  a  proper  sense  of 
patriotism;  and  this  illustrates  why  the  need  of  a  right 
sense  as  to  this  thing  should  still  be  pressing.  And  so 
it  must  continue,  it  must  be  perennial,  so  long  as  such 
questions  as  this  one  in  France  exist,  the  duty  there  of 
loyalty,  of  harmony,  of  unity,  even  at  a  good  deal  of 
personal  cost ;  or  so  long  as  the  United  States  in  North 
America  persists  in  not  opening  its  eyes  quite  widely 
to  great  questions  like  that  of  immigration,  or  the  re- 
form of  the  civil  service ;  or  so  long  as  such  a  thing 
may  happen  as  that  a  distinguished  scholar  like  M. 
Clermont-Ganneau  shall  be  prevented  from  obtaining 


ON   A  CERTAIN   DANGER   IN   PATRIOTISM.        35 

his  legitimate  recognition  as  the  real  discoverer  of 
the  remarkable  historic  frauds  associated  with  the 
name  of  the  distinguished  Shapira, — prevented  because 
of  the  singular  notion  that  it  really  matters  more  to 
what  country  a  wise  man  belongs  than  whether  he 
be  wise ;  so  long,  for  instance,  as  people  of  Irish  blood 
in  America  confound  the  word  "  nationality  "  with  the 
word  "  nation ;  "  or  so  long  as  the  English  conscience 
does  not  in  some  way  summon  to  its  aid  (against  all  the 
ideals  of  the  liberty  of  the  press  and  the  equality  of 
all  before  the  law)  some  ingenious  scheme  to  alter  its 
present  modes  of  procedure  in  the  divorce  court,  re- 
sulting in  such  unpleasant  and  unnecessary  revelations 
as  we  all  nowadays  are  being  let  read  as  the  result 
of  the  most  approved  and  modern  systems  of  cross- 
examination. 

So  let  patriotism  have  its  due  as  a  great  thing  in 
the  world  still,  both  as  incentive  and  as  duty.  There 
will  always  be  a  kind  of  moral  persuasion  upon  most 
people,  a  force  emanating  directly  from  the  community 
in  which  they  are  born,  which  will  keep  them  in  those 
moods  which  are  known  as  loyal  or  patriotic,  even  if 
it  does  not  lead  them  to  exaggerate  the  power  of  these 
fine  ideas;  and  although,  as  I  have  been  showing, 
people  often  make  mistakes  and  get  false  ideas  about 
patriotism  and  loyalty,  so  that  in  reality  they  may  not 
be  half  patriotic  enough,  the  common  sense  of  the 


36  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

community  may  sometimes  be  left  to  correct  such 
errors  and  lessen  the  dangers  of  the  exaggerated  or 
false  patriotism.  So  this  danger  may  be  put  out  of 
account  in  appreciating  the  value  of  patriotism,  and 
the  necessity  of  it  in  a  certain  sense  may  be  granted 
without  more  ado.  But  what  I  said  at  first  about  the 
change  in  the  force  and  extent  of  its  persuasiveness  in 
the  world  to-day  is  the  main  point  upon  which  I 
would  insist.  There  is  no  doubt  about  that :  patriot- 
ism is  no  longer  the  thing  it  was. 

A  real  service  is  done  to  others  always  in  expressing 
freshly  their  common  but  unspoken  conviction  upon 
any  serious  matter.  A  writer  who  does  this  runs  a 
chance  of  being  read,  and  indeed  risks  almost  all  of 
the  other  dangerous  honours  upon  the  long  Appian 
Way  of  the  classics,  so  constantly  overrun  by  the 
Goths  and  Vandals  of  letters.  I  lay  no  claim  to  the 
possession  of  a  heart  eager  for  encounters  with  any  of 
these  breezy  Northmen.  But  the  chief  corroboration 
of  my  way  of  thinking  on  these  matters  of  patriotism 
and  cosmopolitism  as  contrasted  ideals  for  the  moment 
(although  they  overlap  again  and  again  in  reality)  is, 
after  all,  the  fact  that  I  chance,  without  originality, 
to  be  expressing  only  the  common  and  increasing, 
but  as  yet  unconfessed,  conviction  of  most  widely 
awakened  men  in  all  countries,  a  conviction  which 
has  been  forced  upon  them  by  the  very  growth  and 


ON  A   CERTAIN   DANGER   IN   PATRIOTISM.        37 

expansion  of  the  time.  Every  moment  makes  a  com- 
pacter  Earth,  and  makes  the  thought  and  act  of  each 
of  the  most  indifferent  of  us  more  responsible  and 
quickly  efficient  things  than  ever  they  have  been  be- 
fore. And  the  first  great  effect  of  this  world-contrac- 
tion is  just  this  growing  suspicion  as  to  the  absolute 
value  of  international  barriers,  and  this  opening  of 
individual  minds,  which  have  made  patriotism  not 
at  all  the  thing  it  was.  But  "  common  sense  "  in  a 
community  —  a  thing  which  is  a  very  justly  vaunted 
mark  of  English-speaking  communities  —  cannot  uni- 
formly as  yet  be  trusted  to  be  really  sane  in  any  large 
sort  of  way.  There  is  unfortunately  no  assurance,  as 
all  these  random  illustrations  with  which  we  have 
been  dealing  indicate,  that  "  common  sense  "  as  yet  — 
even  in  this  rapidly  contracting  world  —  can  unfail- 
ingly detect  the  true  patriotism  from  the  false. 
"  Common  sense  "  is  very  short-sighted.  "  Common 
sense "  has  not  even  the  privilege  of  clairvoyance. 
"  Common  sense  "  is  a  very  dogged,  persistent  foe  of 
the  ideal,  and  it  rarely  generalises  rapidly  enough  for 
events. 

This  is  what  English  history  is  always  betraying, 
and  never  more  painfully  than  at  the  present  time. 
The  English  —  a  people  who  pass  for  being  logical,  but 
who  stumble  on  their  course  more  heavily  weighted 
than  any  other  people  in  a  kind  of  ponderous  sabot  of 


38  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

"  common  sense  "  of  a  certain  sort  —  are,  unfortunately 
for  themselves,  not  really  logical  after  all.  Happily 
the  clog-gait,  however,  and  oddly  enough,  is  a  positive 
gain  for  humanity. 

Consider  for  a  moment  the  English  record.  The 
Romans  may  have  been  as  successful  as  the  English 
have  been  in  the  reorganisation  of  conquered  provinces, 
in  the  civilising  of  the  outer  world  less  complicated 
than  that  just  beyond  the  walls  of  Rome  and  beyond 
Italy ;  but  no  modern  peoples  have  shown  anything  like 
English  ability  in  reconstructing  in  a  special  mould 
various  and  utterly  alien  races,  for  no  modern  peoples 
have  had  just  the  English  tangible  ideal,  their  practi- 
cal genius  for  institutions.  With  this  thought  in  the 
mind  one  looks  about  one's  planet  with  astonishment. 
Undeviating  energy,  such  as  went  to  the  making  of 
New  England  and  then  leapt  to  the  westward  over  the 
Alleghanies ;  such  as  crystallised,  legalised,  let  me  say 
institutionised,  the  vast  and  varied  nationalities  of 
India ;  such  as  is  now  disporting  itself  in  its  final  field 
of  activity,  the  great  new  world  of  Africa  of  the  South, 
—  is  both  admirable,  and  Unrivalled.  And  Egypt  needs 
not  be  omitted  from  this  list.  Yet  this  energy,  arising 
from  the  need  of  healthy  activity,  and  a  very  narrow, 
unphilosophic,  but  practical  passion  for  personal  ag- 
grandisement, has  always  (I  cannot  think  of  an  ex- 
ception on  any  large  scale)  been  an  extremely  selfish 


ON   A   CERTAIN   DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        39 

impulse.  Breadth  of  vision,  ideality,  the  sense  of 
humanity  (except  —  and  not  always  then 1  —  when 
interpreted  to  this  people  in  ideas  of  justice  or  in- 
justice), have  not  been  English  marks ;  and  yet  without 
these  native  characteristics,  even  any  intimate  sense 
of  common  kinship,  when  portions  of  the  same  nation 
are  separated  by  wide,  estranging  seas,  inevitably  tends 
to  disappear.  The  individual  problems,  the  individ- 
ual interests,  are  usually  all-important  to  the  English, 
and  the  general  drift  has  always  been  the  same  in  this 
race  wherever  a  cleavage  has  occurred.  Australia  and 
Canada  to-day  are  loyal  chiefly  from  inertia  and  from 
gallantry ;  the  centre  of  gravity  of  their  patriotism  has 
shifted,  and  is  no  longer  at  Greenwich.  It  is  not 
needful  to  prove  so  obvious  a  remark.  An  exceptional 
and  perhaps  laudable  astuteness  in  political  conduct 
could  even  have  withstood  for  a  little  this  very  omnipo- 

1  Civis  Romanus  sum  was  a  grand  cry.  Of  its  best  intent 
we  have  an  inkling  in  the  "  idea "  of  the  Emperor  Marcus 
Aurelius,  —  the  idea  "  of  a  polity  in  which  there  is  the  same  law 
for  all,  a  polity  administered  with  regard  to  equal  rights  and 
equal  freedom  of  a  people,  and  the  idea  of  a  kingly  govern- 
ment which  respects  most  of  all  the  freedom  of  the  governed." 
But,  as  Mr.  Gladstone,  in  the  famous  debate  in  the  English 
Parliament  in  1850,  on  the  claims  of  Don  Pacifico,  declared, 
the  phrase  has  a  certain  "  inapplicability  to  the  condition  and 
claims  of  an  English  citizen."  English  blood,  however,  usually 
finds  much  difficulty  in  throbbing  in  consonance  with  this 
opinion. 


40  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

tence  in  the  onrush  of  the  time.  Colonial  loyalty  and 
patriotism  could  have  heen  directed  yet  a  while  still  to 
the  same  island  centre,  and  we  should  not  even  now 
be  hearing  Sir  Richard  Cartwright  and  Mr.  Cecil 
Ehodes  delivering  speeches  which  in  an  "unconstitu- 
tional "  monarchy  would  be  thought  high  treason, 
and  even  but  three  hundred  years  ago  in  England 
had  been  punished  as  such.  Such  astuteness,  how- 
ever, is  not  in  the  English  blood.  Fortunately  for 
the  interests  of  humanity,  English  patriotism,  while 
not  really  of  the  large  stamp,  being  so  maladroitly 
fanned,  is  having,  however,  the  best  of  results;  and 
this  digression  shows,  I  believe,  what  I  meant  in  say- 
ing that  the  clog-gait  is  sweet  music  in  His  Holiness 
the  Zeitgeist's  ears ;  for  this  august  personage  is  work- 
ing avowedly  in  the  interests  of  humanity,  rather  than 
in  those  of  any  particular,  even  the  most  amiable  or 
worthy,  section  of  it. 

But  let  the  illustration  of  English  colonisation  be 
pursued,  indeed,  with  even  more  analysis  still.  Take 
such  an  article  as  I  read  the  other  day  in  the  Times 
on  the  largest  and  most  interesting  of  modern  English 
institutions,  the  British  South  Africa  Company. 
The  article  to  which  I  refer  appeared  just  on  the  day 
before  the  first  regular  meeting  of  this  immense  or- 
ganization was  to  be  held  in  London,  and  it  was  con- 
ceived in  a  really  uncommon  spirit  of  frankness.  It 


ON  A  CERTAIN   DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.         41 

was  written,  moreover,   not  only  with  candour,  but, 
on  the   whole,  with  literary  probity.     But  scattered 
throughout  this   article  were  a  number  of   sentence*  - 
like  this:— 


"Germany  fortunately  was  not  then  ripe  for    colonia 


enterprise." 

Then,  speaking  of  a  proposed  German  expedition 
into  Matabele  Land  from  Walfish  Bay,  in  1885,  this 
article  said  :  — 

"  Fortunately,  by  an  accidental  circumstance  the  expedi- 
tion was  postponed,  and  our  government  had  time  to  realise 
the  seriousness  of  the  situation." 

Now,  such  passages  as  these  are  inspired,  naively 
inspired,  with  the  very  breath  of  the  old  admirable 
patriotism,  —  the  patriotism  which,  after  love  of  God 
and  love  of  father  and  mother,  all  conventionally 
brought  up  young  people  in  most  Christian  countries 
have  learned  to  be  binding.  And  although  it  would 
be  a  simple  thing  instantly  to  add  many  a  passage 
more  efficient  for  my  purpose,  none  needs  be  better. 
For  how  self  -revealed,  in  all  its  fine  boyish  inade- 
quateness,  such  a  patriotism  is.  Like  a  rosy  baby  in 
a  bath,  Patriotism  stands  here  naked  and  unashamed. 
As  it  happens,  indeed,  the  Times  is  positively  right. 
It  is  a  fortunate  thing,  if  somebody's  conscience  is  to 
be  saddled  with  the  weighty  responsibility  of  setting 


42  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

a-rolling  across  Africa  over  native  bodies  the  great 
bespangled  Juggernaut  car  of  civilisation,  that  that 
conscience  should  be  English;  for  when  Englishmen 
are  confronted  before  Rhadamanthus  with  the  debit 
account  against  them  of  the  long  list  of  murders  and 
of  selfish  plunderings  which  always  mark  the  path  of 
the  Christian  peoples  in  new  lands,  and  especially 
of  this  one,  as  the  long  tragedy  of  the  American 
Indians  illustrates,  they  may  be  able  to  commute  the 
death-sentence  to  a  paltry  twenty  years'  penal  servi- 
tude, perhaps,  owing  merely  to  the  proofs  afforded  on 
the  credit  page  of  the  same  ledger  of  the  speed  with 
which  bridges  and  roads,  and  post-offices  and  telegraph 
lines,  and  schools  and  churches  and  courts,  have 
sprung  up,  more  numerous  in  South  Africa  in  five 
years  than  would  have  been  the  case  in  twenty  under 
any  other  bandits.  But  this,  I  fancy,  was  not  the 
line  of  thought  of  the  writer  of  these  sentences;  and 
the  content  of  his  words,  what  he  himself  sought  to 
express,  and  did  express  even  more  completely  than 
he  imagined  at  the  time,  was  simply  his  own  patriot- 
ism, the  intense  loyalty  of  the  English  marrow.  The 
facts  throughout  his  article  are  given,  I  imagine,  with 
fairness.  In  one  place  the  writer  even  speaks  in 
hostile  criticism  of  some  of  the  methods  of  the  Com- 
pany in  question,  in  such  terms  as  follow :  "  Just 
such  blunders  as  these  have  been  committed  by  Eng- 


ON   A   CERTAIN  DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM.        43 

lishmen  with  respect  to  similar  enterprises  in  Africa 
and  elsewhere  during  the  past  four  hundred  years." 
And  of  no  man  speaking  with  reference  to  his  coun- 
trymen shall  we  ever  expect  more  than  this  in  the 
way  of  criticism ;  such  frankness  is  positively  touching. 
But  this  unwitting,  most  natural,  interpretation  of  the 
facts  is  an  interesting  thing.  The  spirit  of  it  is  so 
uncritical;  so  uncritical,  although,  after  all,  what  is 
said,  is  so  true.  It  reminds  one  directly  of  the  still 
more  patriotic  way  that  the  Hebrew  writers  had, —  of 
the  style,  for  instance,  of  the  Homeric  hook  of  Judges. 
One  passage  in  particular  returns  to  me  in  the  force 
of  all  its  unpremeditated  charm.  It  was  in  the  time 
of  the  wars  with  Ammon,  when  Jephthah,  a  "  mighty 
man  of  valour, "  indeed  the  most  notorious  foot-pad  of 
the  time,  deigned  to  parley  with  the  outrageous  inso- 
lence of  the  Ammonites  in  their  desire  to  recover  land 
formerly  taken  from  them  hy  the  Israelites  when  they 
issued  from  Egypt.  Jephthah  sent  messengers  to  the 
Ammonites,  and  in  fact  did  so  more  than  once, — mes- 
sengers whom  he  instructed  to  deny  absolutely  the 
legal  right  of  that  people  to  the  land  in  dispute ;  and 
he  asserted  his  position  with  a  strenuous,  persistent, 
but  naive  eloquence  which  on  every  other  rule  of  in- 
ternational law  than  that  associated  with  the  name  of 
Rob  Hoy,  who  was  surely  among  the  most  conspicu- 
•  ous  to  apply  the  principle  of  the  survival  of  the  fittest 


44  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

to  these  questions,  was  really  sophistical.  The  gist 
of  his  position  was  briefly,  in  his  own  language, 
this:  — 

"  So  now  the  Lord,  the  God  of  Israel,  hath  dispossessed 
the  Amorites  from  before  his  people  Israel,  and  shouldest 
thou  possess  them  ?  Wilt  not  thou  possess  that  which 
Chemosh  they  god  giveth  thee  to  possess  '?  So  whomsoever 
the  Lord  our  God  hath  dispossessed  from  before  us,  them  will 
we  possess." 

There  is  no  gainsaying  this,  it  is  so  admirably 
direct,  it  is  so  strenuously  patriotic.  But  between 
these  words  and  those  of  the  writer  in  the  Times, 
"fortunately,  by  an  accidental  circumstance  the 
expedition  was  postponed,  and  our  government  had 
time  to  realise  the  seriousness  of  the  situation, "  how 
little  difference  there  is!  The  formulas  are  altered. 
The  writer  in  the  Times  speaks  of  "  accidental 
circumstances "  where  his  predecessor  talks  about 
"  the  Lord  God  of  Israel. "  But  the  spirit  of  the  two 
writers  is  quite  the  same,  so  much  so,  indeed,  that 
it  would  almost  seem  quite  in  the  face  of  all  that 
I  have  been  saying  that  patriotism  is  as  much  as 
ever  patriotism,  and  that  I  have  been  hopelessly 
wrong. 

But  there  is  a  difference,  nevertheless,  and  the 
change  in  the  formulas  is  a  great  thing.  All  this  talk 
about  England's  splendid  gift  for  dominance,  her  prac- 


ON  A  CERTAIN  DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        45 

tical  genius  for  colonisation,  and  the  parallel  between 
the  style  of  the  writer  in  the  Times  and  that  of  the 
author  of  Judges,  are  useful  in  gradually  bringing  us 
nearer  to  a  more  critical  sense  of  what  patriotism 
really  is,  and  what  patriotism  should  be,  and  even 
when  it  should  not  exist  at  all.  And  as  I  said,  a  use- 
ful thing  for  us  all  is  to  know  how  to  detect  the  true 
patriotism  from  the  false,  lest  ever,  in  being  quite 
patriotic  according  to  the  "  common  sense "  of  the 
community  into  which  our  parents  precipitated  us, 
we  likewise  succeed  all  unwittingly  in  being  really 
ridiculous,  and  in  losing  the  advantages  of  a  certain 
larger  air.  But  the  inquiry,  though  always  one  which, 
inevitably,  we  shall  be  pursuing  individually  forever, 
can  never  cease  to  be  anything  but  complex,  indeed 
must  become  rapidly  more  and  more  complex  for  all  of 
us.  It  was  a  comparatively  simple  thing  for  Jephthah 
to  make  up  his  patriotic  mind  as  to  his  proper  line  of 
conduct  at  a  time  when  the  great  duty  of  a  leader  was 
to  create  the  feeling  of  unity  and  nationality,  and  to 
secure,  at  any  cost,  compactness  of  national  fibre ;  and 
it  is  not  much  more  complicated  a  question  for  Lord 
Salisbury  to-day  to  see  that  English  imperial  safety, 
English  patriotism,  demands  an  understanding  with 
the  Sultan  regarding  Egypt,  and  the  giving  of  every 
facility  in  South  Africa  to  the  great  companies  there 
which,  incidentally  in  search  of  territory  and  of  gold, 


46  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

are  seeking  only  to  abolish  slavery  in  those  regions.1 
But  the  problem  is  not  so  simple  for  Englishmen  in 
Canada,  in  Newfoundland,  in  Ireland,  in  Australia; 
was  not  the  other  day  for  citizens  of  the  North  American 
United  States  in  respect  to  Chili,  or  now  in  Behring 
Sea,  or  the  Isthmus  of  Panama,  or  when  they  have 
to  legislate  on  immigration  and  naturalisation ;  for  the 
Tsar  in  respect  to  Finland ;  for  the  Emperor  Erancis 
Joseph,  with  Count  Apponyi  and  the  young  Tzechs 
and  the  Croats  on  his  hands  at  once,  or  when  he 
remembers  that  he  is  a  good  Catholic,  and  at  the  same 
time  the  second  great  factor  of  the  Triple  Alliance; 
for  the  Emperor  of  China,  with  the  officiousness  of 
England  and  America,  anxious  about  their  missiona- 
ries, to  cope  with ;  above  all,  for  the  German  Emperor, 
inoculated  with  the  imperial  blood  of  the  hierarchic 
Hohenzollerns,  the  incarnation  of  one  of  the  two  great 
principles  surviving  from  the  times  of  superstition  which 
science  and  criticism  have  now  almost  sent  to  the 
limbo  of  useless  human  inventions,  divine  right  and 

1  Though  this  sound  like  sarcasm,  I  hasten  to  wash  my 
hands  of  flippancy  like  this.  "  This  railway,"  said  Mr.  Cham- 
berlain the  other  day  at  a  "  Liberal  Union  "  dinner  in  London 
of  the  Mombasa  railway,  "which  we  are  told,  and  which  we 
believe,  would  lead  to  the  practical  suppression  of  slavery  over 
a  great  part  of  the  African  continent,  would  also  incidentally 
extend  British  influence  and  promote  British  commerce."  No 
laughter  is  reported  by  the  stenographer  of  the  Times. 


ON  A  CERTAIN   DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        47 

papal  infallibility  —  above  all,  I  say,  for  this  German 
Emperor  when  he  thinks  on  his  pillow  of  the  provinces 
of  Alsace  and  of  Lorraine. 

So  that  no  one  of  us  can  now  go  flippantly  by  such 
considerations  as  these  with  any  light  sense  of  our 
individual  responsibility  to  settle  at  least  for  our  own 
satisfaction  the  sense  that  these  old  words  and  formu- 
las are  to  have  for  us  to-day.  And  if  any  one  tells  me 
that  there  is  something  rather  remote,  something  too 
transcendental  and  not  very  pressing  in  these  matters, 
so  that  I  had  much  better  be  doing  something  else 
than  to  call  attention  to  them,  the  burden  of  proof 
may  be  on  my  side,  but  I  shall  not  protest  with  him 
over  much.  I  desire  only  quietly  to  imagine  that  I 
am  right,  and  that  he  is  flippantly  wrong.  I  recall 
M.  Renan :  Ce  qui  me  semble  un  monstre  dans  Vhu- 
manite,  c'est  V indifference  et  la  legerete. 

Yes,  the  matter  is  really  serious,  and  has  large  bear- 
ings; for  it  is  nothing  more  or  less  than  the  great 
question  whether  or  not  any  closely-knit  community 
nowadays  is  consciously  to  retard  the  streams  of  tenden- 
cies that  are  making  for  human  uplifting.  When  Spar- 
tans were  shut  within  their  beautiful  valley  under  the 
snow-ridge  of  Taygetos,  isolated,  almost  inaccessible, 
the  laws  of  their  compact  state,  taking  their  natural 
growth,  became  individual,  peculiar,  but  picturesquely 
suitable  to  the  people,  the  moment,  and  the  place. 


48  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

We  have  happened  on  other  times ;  and  yet  when  we 
do  not  use  the  formulas  of  the  Greeks  and  Latins,  we 
build  with  the  Gothic  debris  of  the  Middle  Age. 
"  When  Paris  is  right  or  wrong, "  says  M.  Arsene 
Houssaye,  "it  is  the  fault  of  Athens  or  of  Borne." 
This,  depend  upon  it,  is  not  as  it  should  be;  for 
while  the  planet,  to  the  naked  eye,  is  ever  almost  the 
same,  the  nations  that  laugh  and  cry  upon  its  surface 
are  vastly,  determinably,  irrecoverably  changed. 

Any  demand  made  upon  us,  therefore,  in  restriction 
of  our  individual  liberty  to  think  freely  as  citizens 
of  the  planet  first,  with  our  thoughts  and  vision  on 
larger  notions  than  those  of  nation,  or  even  of  race, 
must,  hi  general,  be  resisted.  It  is  unwarrantable 
repression.  My  charge  against  patriotism  is  mainly 
this,  that  it  has  usually  been  a  sanctioned  obligation 
thrust  upon  us  all  at  the  expense  of  the  dignity  of  hu- 
man nature ;  and  in  substituting  for  it  a  less  repressive 
passion,  I  have  but  one  regret,  namely,  that  I  did  not 
invent  the  phrase,  "  the  passion  for  the  planet. "  Such 
a  passion  certainly  points  the  way  to  what  is  clearly  a 
more  desirable  end  at  this  time  for  us  all. 

But  I  recognize  a  danger  in  writing  in  this  fashion. 
I  am  afraid  that  the  more  we  know  of  the  human 
temper,  the  less  its  present  dignity  is  apt  to  impress 
us;  the  less  indeed  we  shall  have  to  say  about  its 
dignity  at  all,  with  any  such  meaning  as  both  Chris- 


ON  A  CERTAIN   DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM.        49 

tianity  and  Science  have  up  to  this  century  usually 
put  into  that  word.1  Mankind  has  believed  ever  in 
a  chosen  people ,  and  then  it  got  the  notion  of  a  chosen 
race;  and  even  Science  clung  for  a  long  time  to  the 
inspiriting  conception  of  a  chosen  planet,  and  even  the 
broadest  humanity  has,  quite  without  a  suspicion  of 
narrowness,  almost  always  ruled  out  every  creature 
save  the  human,  —  save  man,  who,  drunk  with  his 
own  imaginings,  and  without  criticism,  declared  him- 
self made  in  the  image  of  a  god  whose  form  and  fea- 
tures he  himself  had  unwittingly  invented.  The  great 
poets,  to  be  sure,  saw  with  a  more  discerning  intuition. 
The  Egyptians  of  the  early,  unpedantic  faith,  a  Saint 
Francis  of  Assisi,  a  Wordsworth,  are  sufficiently  iso- 
lated and  dissimilar  instances  to  indicate  that  complete 
Nature  —  the  Nature,  I  mean,  that  the  scientific  im- 
pulse gives  us  —  has  always  and  everywhere  had  a  few 
sympathetic  adorers.  But  for  the  most  part  the 
nations  up  to  just  the  other  day  had  gone  on  in  roads 
worn  each  century  more  deeply,  and  affording  ever 
less  and  less  outlook  across  their  hedges.  The  gods 

1  Compare  "  Hopkinsianism,"  however,  and  "  Edwardsism," 
with  their  formulas  about  the  "  principle  of  divine  sovereignty," 
with  the  relegation  of  the  prerogatives  of  "  absolute  monarchy  " 
to  God,  —  a  scheme  in  which  man's  conformity  to  the  "  means  of 
grace  "  and  his  almost  superhuman  struggle  to  find  the  way  to 
the  "  foot  of  the  throne,"  were  a  kind  of  man-baiting  practised  by 
an  Almighty  Chief  of  the  Sports. 

4 


50  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

would  seem  to  have  been,  for  some  five  thousand 
years,  drinking  or  hunting  on  Olympus.  Apparently 
an  intolerable  boredom,  at  some  time  about  the  middle 
of  the  last  century,  filled  all  the  corridors  and  lobbies 
of  the  Olympian  palace.  Hermes  himself  would  ap- 
pear to  have  fallen  asleep,  in  some  long  afternoon 
siesta.  Then,  Zeus,  waking  from  his  lethargy  and 
casting  about  for  a  decorous  diversion,  conceived  a 
secret  plan  and  despatched  Hermes  with  sealed  orders. 
These,  opened  on  the  journey,  read  as  follows: 
"Away  to  Solar  System  No.  8,369,868,3221+,  Planet 
No.  3,  European  Division.  Section  France!  Elec- 
trify all  heads.  The  race  of  Earth  moves  too  slowly. 
Afterwards  go  with  Hephaistos  to  England  and  to 
New  England,  American  Division,  and  let  us  see  what 
you  can  do."  And  everybody  knows  what  happened. 
But  although  there  are  incidents  of  just  the  other 
day  like  the  French  and  American  Eevolutions,  and 
although  there  are  books  and  lives  and  achievements 
which  one  does  well  to  remember,  and  which  do  make 
us  think  so  much  better  of  the  capacity  of  mankind  on 
"Planet  No.  3,  Solar  System  No.  8,369,868,322+," 
that  we  really  may  be  amiable  to  our  commiserating 
friends  the  optimists  and  the  Comtists  and  what  not, 
and  tolerate  a  certain  amount  of  after-dinner  talk  about 
our  present  dignity  as  men,  yet  I  wish  distinctly  my- 
self to  avoid  laying  any  stress  on  the  word;  for  our 


ON   A    CERTAIN   DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        51 

slight  civilisation  really  cannot  as  yet,  to  any  critical 
sense,  warrant  so  fine  an  epithet.  We  have  done  too 
little;  before  us  lies  too  vast  a  future.1 

Yet  the  trouble  with  patriotism  in  distinction  from 
cosmopolitism  is  —  and  now  I  may  return  to  my  re- 
mark without  danger  of  misconception  —  the  trouble 
with  patriotism  is  mainly  this,  that,  being  always  one 
of  the  class  of  popular  obligations  with  a  "  moral  " 
sanction,  it  has  ordinarily  exercised  a  compulsion  which 
has  limited  our  interests  and  our  freer  growth  to  a 
degree  seriously  injurious,  not  merely  to  individual 

1  In  that  vast  future,  however,  what  problems  will  be  solved, 
what  ameliorations  secured,  what  insights  revealed !  I  often 
think  of  the  words  of  Buffon :  "  Loin  de  se  decourager,  le 
philosophe  doit  applaudir  a  la  nature,  lors  me  me  qu'elle  lui 
parait  avare  ou  trop  mysterieuse,  et  se  feliciter  de  ce  qu'a 
mesure  qu'il  leve  une  partie  de  son  voile,  elle  lui  laisse  entrevoir 
une  immensite  d'autres  objets,  tous  dignes  de  ses  recherches. 
Car  ce  que  nous  connaissons  deja  doit  nous  faire  juger  de 
ce  que  nous  pouvons  connaitre ;  1'esprit  humain  n'a  point  de 
bornes,  il  s'e'tend  a  mesure  que  1'univers  se  deploie ;  1'homme  peut 
done  et  doit  tout  tenter ;  il  ne  lui  faut  que  du  temps  pour  tout 
s.ivoir.  II  pourrait  meme,  en  multipliant  ses  observations,  voir 
et  prevoir  tous  les  phenomenes,  tous  les  evenements  de  la  na- 
ture, avec  autant  de  verite  et  de  certitude  que  s'il  les  deduisait 
immediatement  des  causes ;  et  quel  enthousiasme  plus  pardon- 
nable  et  meme  plus  noble  que  celui  de  croire  l'homme  capable 
de  reconnaitre  toutes  les  puissances,  et  decouvrir  par  ses  travaux 
tous  les  secrets  de  la  nature !  "-  It  is  a  dream  of  a  new  heaven 
and  a  new  earth,  but  henceforward  only  science  can  fly  so 
straight  against  the  sun  on  poetic  wings. 


52  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

expansion,  but  to  the  whole  "  dignity  of  humanity. " 
And  it  is  just  this  larger  end,  this  dignity  of  humanity, 
that  is  perforce  the  goal,  I  suppose,  of  all  of  us.  Pa- 
triotism has  tended  always  to  be  one  of  the  most  ex- 
acting of  those  ideals  that  stifle  our  naturalness  and 
free  play ;  and  yet  it  is  only  by  sincerity,  by  complete 
confidence  in  oneself,  by  quiet,  open-eyed  persistence 
in  one's  own  faith,  whatever  others  niay  think  or  say, 
that  we  can  ever  hope  to  merit  the  recording  of  any 
single  achievement  of  ours,  however  slight,  on  the 
pages  of  Time's  note-book  of  the  best.  That  kind  of 
patriotism,  then,  is  discernibly  useless  which  imprisons 
any  large  impulses  or  retards  mankind  on  this  high 
course.  As  a  political  or  social  being  man  is  bound 
always  to  be  an  opportunist.  Opportunism  is  the 
only  moral,  because  it  is  the  only  possible,  method  of 
man's  going.  And  this  implies  a  myriad  of  compro- 
mises, a  myriad  of  acts  that  in  any  absolute  view  are 
follies  and  vulgarities,  but  are  relatively  not  merely 
important,  not  merely  "  good, "  but  inevitable.  The 
play  of  destiny  as  we  are,  we  must  all  make  up  our 
minds  to  restriction.  We  live  in  a  prison;  and  al- 
though we  never  see  the  Warder,  His  iron  bars  and 
chains  must  chafe  us  forever,  and  some  of  us  to  death. 
But  there  is  some  solace  —  it  is  at  all  events  the  only 
one  that  we  have  —  that  we  may  look  about  us  at 
what  lies  just  near  at  hand,  and  get  a  pretty  clear 


ON  A   CERTAIN   DANGER  IN   PATRIOTISM.        53 

notion  of  what  it  is  that  is  chafing  us,  and  best  of  all 
study  (for  without  such  study  we  shall  never  know 
anything  worth  knowing)  ourselves.  With  the  one 
divining-rod,  Curiosity,  we  may  conjure  so  much  of 
Truth  as  to  know  that  we  are  at  least  not  any  longer 
being  deceived.  Nor  is  this  so  unsatisfying  an  assur- 
ance after  all.  For  this  one  thing,  at  least,  we  may 
know,  that  we  necessarily  make  some  progress.  But 
because  much  that  is  called  patriotism,  in  repressing 
something  of  our  freedom  and  sincerity,  and  in  making 
the  worse  appear  the  better  reason,  can  only  retard 
us,  can  only  veil  the  vision  of  the  spectacle  of  the 
various  and  richly  humanising  planet- view,  it  is  very 
questionable  whether  we  can  afford  to  cultivate  it  at 
the  expense  of  this  other  ideal,  this  hope  of  getting  at 
last  a  wider  scope. 

To  those  of  us  who  chance  to  deal  with  the  instru- 
ment of  the  English  tongue,  the  facts  which  are  for  us 
personally  insistent  must  always  belong  to  a  peculiar 
series,  must  appeal  always  with  a  special  force.  We 
cannot  evade  nationality,  even  were  wisdom  in  that 
way.  And  the  critic  has  his  own  passionate  attach- 
ments, which  it  is  no  part  of  his  obligation  to  reveal. 
There  is  the  English  oak  and  the  holly,  and  the  high 
gloss  of  the  green  on  the  box-leaves  at  the  season  of 
the  English  Christmas,  —  symbols  all  round  the  planet, 


54  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

for  those  who  came  out  of  the  rich,  specialised,  in- 
dividual English  land,  of  warm,  wholesome  life  and 
hearty,  unthinking  optimism.  And  to  all  those  en- 
deared traditions  for  which  these  symbols  stand  many 
of  us  would  always  cling  more  tenaciously  than  to  any 
marked  by  so  unintelligible  a  sign  as,  for  instance, 
the  orchid,  detached  recipient  of  all  that  is  borne  on 
every  wind;  or  as  the  banyan,  spreading  and  variously 
striking  root,  although  without  loss  of  identity,  over 
wide  stretches  of  after  all  common  ground;  or  as  the 
elm,  that  throws  its  shadow  in  New  English  highways 
across  delightful  memorable  gables. 

But  of  such  individual  loves  and  such  special  at- 
tachments I  have  deliberately  here  said  nothing.  Not 
even  at  this  moment  did  it  seem  worth  while  to  insist 
that  the  great,  new,  yet  now  ageing  world  of  the  United 
States  of  North  America,  with  its  temper  so  perennially 
fresh,  and  yet  with  origins  so  venerable,  appears  to  me 
individually  the  land  where  all  the  interesting  solu- 
tions of  the  problems  that  haunt  men's  minds  to-day 
are  to  be  first  written  in  intelligible  letters  for  the 
very  race  itself.  And  if  this  is  to  be  in  time  the  large 
privilege  of  this  land,  its  sons  may  now  and  then  be 
suffered  to  set  up  their  own  particular  ancestral  gods 
even  in  the  open,  and  to  felicitate  themselves  even  in 
uncritical  terms  upon  their  fair  lot  at  being  under  so 


ON  A  CERTAIN   DANGER  IN  PATRIOTISM.        55 

apparently  responsible,  so  fortunate  a  destiny.  But 
even  for  such  devotees  as  these  there  will  be  no  harm 
in  remembering  Chemosh  and  the  Ammonites ;  for  it  is 
in  the  spirit  of  such  double  recollection  that  wisdom 
may  most  readily  be  found. 


ENGLISH    AND    "AMERICANS.3 


ENGLISH  AND  "AMEKICANS." 


I  speak  with  the  freedom  of 
history,  and  I  hope  without 
offence  —  BURKE, 


I. 


THERE  is  often  a  restful  charm  in  generalisation. 
This  word  stands  at  times  for  possibilities  of  intelli- 
gent pleasure  to  be  indulged  in  without  any  of  the 
irritation  sure  to  be  aroused  in  well-ordered  minds  by 
crackling  paradox.  A  child  busies  itself  by  the  hour 
with  iron-filings  and  a  magnet;  and  grown-up  babies 
find  a  similar  but  keener  pleasure  in  tempering  pet 
magnets  of  their  own,  and  then  in  proudly  proving 
their  attracting  and  co-ordinating  power  throughout 
the  apparent  chaos  of  the  world's  facts.  But  unsuc- 
cessful generalisation  worries  rather  than  comforts, 
even  though  it  suggest.  So  that  when  an  English 
friend  of  mind  the  other  day  thought  to  mark  for  me 
the  present  drift  of  society  in  the  North  American 
United  States  by  saying  that  in  that  country,  in  its 
supposed  aping  of  English  manners,  the  rest  of  the 
civilised  world  was  enjoying  the  amusing  spectacle  of 
an  entire  nation  playing  the  part  of  the  prodigal  son, 


60  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

—  of  a  nation  that  had  sought  after  strange  gods  in 
other  lands,  and  was  now  returning  in  repentance  to 
the  ancestral  mansion  and  the  lordly  park,  —  I  too, 
in  my  turn,  ventured  to  be  amused,  and  made  the 
generalisation  of  my  own  that  there  is  everything 
in  the  point  of  view.  On  the  text  of  this  remark  I 
began  with  him  a  monologue,  contrasting  English  and 
American  life.  Now  and  then  I  trod  upon  my  friend's 
insular  toes.  But  I  am  bound  to  say  that  he  was 
too  well-bred,  and  not  quite  insular  enough,  having 
read  much  and  travelled  widely,  at  the  time  to  wince. 
However,  he  promised  to  answer  me  at  our  next 
meeting.  Meanwhile  I  have  looked  over  the  matter 
anew,  and  put  down  some  preliminary  notes,  English 
and  New  English,  to  guide  him  in  his  reply.  I 
warn  him  that  every  word  I  utter  is  either  quite 
meaningless  or  altogether  false  apart  from  its  entire 
context. 

The  vitality  of  England  is  shown  in  her  power  of 
successful  colonisation;  and  there  is  an  English  super- 
stition that  her  safety  lies,  and  that  it  has  always  lain, 
in  being  beloved  by  Poseidon.  To  argue  this  point 
completely  would  require  a  quiet  discussion  of  what 
kind  of  safety  is  worth  having  for  a  nation ;  and  on 
this  point  there  are  many  notions.  But  England,  at 
all  events,  has  not  been  very  vague  as  regards  her 


ENGLISH  AND  "AMERICANS."  61 

own  notion,  and  of  this  great  sea-god  she  has  been  an 
easy-going  and  unquestioning  lover,  with  an  almost 
unnatural  measure  of  tact.  Her  great  rival  beyond 
the  Channel,  against  whose  sea-lights  her  own  send 
challenging  gleams  nightly,  has  commonly  been  char- 
acterised by  a  certain  habit  of  impulse,  and  by  an 
impetuous  sincerity  in  the  realisation  of  her  Gallic 
convictions,  which  the  typical  Englishman  has  never 
understood.  Whenever  he  has  found  himself  begin- 
ning to  admire  this  greater  spontaneity  of  thought, 
and  consequently  of  action,  in  France,  he  has  thought 
it  loyalty  to  his  sovereign  to  harden  his  heart  and  dull 
his  sensibilities,  in  Pharaonic  fashion,  against  that 
modicum  of  approval  which  would  be  betrayed  by 
even  the  early  stages  of  favourable  appreciation. 
This  is  true  even  to-day,  and  in  general  always  has 
been  true,  notwithstanding  the  Continental  affecta- 
tions of  the  small-toed  court  of  William  II.,  the 
mental  attitudes  of  a  third  Earl  of  Shaftesbury,  or  of 
a  finer  than  he,  the  Matthew  Arnold  of  our  own  time, 
a  Wordsworth  sonneteering  eloquently  in  praise  of 
liberty,  or  of  the  present  mild-eyed  Oxford  School  of 
devotees  of  M.  Paul  Bourget;  for  the  moment  I 
am  engaged  in  a  determination  of  the  broad  lines 
of  national  characteristics,  now  fast  disappearing  as 
England  becomes  rapidly  more  cosmopolitan,  not  of 
some  conflicting  and  troublesome  exceptions  proving 


62  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

the  presence  in  this  misty  island  of  important  varie- 
ties of  blood  not  distinctively  English. 

Individually,  to  the  penetrating  student  of  history 
and  human  nature,  average  England  has  .not  been 
admirable,  but  it  has  rarely  failed  to  be  really  inter- 
esting; for  in  the  constantly  varied  Philistinism 
of  our  English  race  there  has  always  been  no  end 
of  ironical  delight  to  be  got  from  our  picturesqueness, 
our  absurd  incompleteness,  our  unclassical  note  of 
provinciality.  Yet  at  home,  save  in  those  surface 
eccentricities  of  aspect  so  easily  caricatured  by  keen 
observers,  Englishmen,  speaking  generally,  have  not 
shown  great  individuality.  This  can  easily  be  main- 
tained ,  in  the  face  of  Dickens  and  Hogarth  and  Cruik- 
shank,  who  are  to  be  conveniently  taken  out  to  prove 
my  point :  exceptiones  prolant  regulas. 

The  types  of  largest  human  interest  have  tended 
always  to  break  away  from  England.  Like  the  planet 
Saturn,  — if  indeed  not  like  the  primeval  god  him- 
self, whom,  as  he  imagined,  times  and  seasons  served, 
and  who  was  so  enamoured  of  his  own  creations  that 
he  devoured  his  own  children,  who  naturally,  there- 
fore, did  not  care  to  live  at  home,  —  England  has 
sloughed  her  fancied  useless  members  in  far-reaching 
rings  of  colonisation.  The  English  island  is  not  so 
small  as  it  appears  on  the  map;  but  it  has  never^ 
been  large  enough  to  hold  men  who  thought  too 


ENGLISH  AND  "AMERICANS."  63 

much  ahead  of  them.  Thinking  behind  has  been 
tolerated,  and  indeed  cultivated,  and  in  such  thinking 
no  people  has  equalled  the  English;  thinking  unde 
authority  and  from  sanctioned  prejudices  has  pi 
Englishmen,  has  pleased  Oxford  and  Cambridge, 
has  been  dry-nursed  into  a  national  habit  of  mind  by 
large  and  generous  endowments.  But  any  obvious 
breaking  away  from  the  conventional  has  so  far  taken 
a  line  of  immoral  eccentricity  as  to  be  too  often 
damned  as  inconvenient  in  the  good  old-fashioned 
sense  of  the  word,  and  practically  proved  so  by  being 
ejected.  Such  ejection  masquerades  to  the  English 
sense  as  the  preservation  of  law  and  order.  But  is 
it  not  really  keeping  the  cover  down  upon  any  un- 
pleasant surprise  that  might  start  up  from  too  sudden 
a  view  of  the  ugly-headed  Jack-in-the-box  Truth? 
For  every  new  idea,  to  men  so  well  established  as 
England's  gentlemen  have  been  and  are,  in  Church 
and  State  and  country  seats,  is  almost  ugly  and  in- 
convenient. The  mere  mechanical  devices  and  scien- 
tific discoveries  of  the  latter  half  of  the  nineteenth 
century,  which  have  forced  into  a  juxtaposition 
before  undreamed  of  every  quarter  of  the  globe,  have 
tempered  isolated  insolence,  wherever  found,  to  a 
certain  appearance  of  urbanity  and  affectation  of 
comity.  But  some  peoples  have  needed  tempering 
more  than  others,  and  our  England  of  Spartan  reti- 


64  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

cence  and  self-sufficiency  is  essentially  Doric  England 
still. 

England,  I  said  just  now,  has  never  been  large 
enough  to  hold  men  who  thought  too  much  ahead  of 
them.  The  sentence  certainly  needs  illumination, 
but  perhaps  it  becomes  a  more  plausible  assertion  if 
I  add  that  people  in  England  who  let  their  minds 
play  freely  are  often  forced  to  live  lives  of  convention 
and  compromise  utterly  inconsistent  with  their  actual 
intellectual  attitudes  and  their  deepest  convictions. 
English  liberty  is  liberty  of  thought  and  expression, 
but  not  of  action;  and  yet  how  energetic  the  Eng- 
lish are!  The  English  mind,  while  less  imaginative 
than  most,  is,  in  all  forms  of  logical  activity,  surer 
of  its  results  than  any  other,  and  the  steadiest  in  the 
world.  Yet  to  be  steady  is  not  always  to  be  sane, 
intelligent;  and  the  want  of  imagination  has  been  so 
essential  a  lack !  With  an  all  but  unrivalled  capacity 
for  pure  thinking  when  he  chooses  to  exercise  his 
mind,  there  are  discernible  quite  unmistakable  proofs 
that  in  practical  realisation  of  his  intellectual  beliefs 
even  the  liberty-loving  Englishman  does  not  like  to 
stand  alone.  He  is  constantly,  moreover,  postponing 
the  donning  of  his  thinking-cap ;  but  in  this  he  mani- 
fests perhaps  merely  the  temporary  indifference  of 
conscious  strength.  The  pleasant  exhaustion  conse- 
quent upon  his  manly  activity  in  the  hunting  or 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  65 

football  field,  or  in  the  lazy  delights  of  the  ineffable 
punt,  is  not  directly  conducive  to  thinking  upon  any 
subject  more  remote  than  how  to  have  a  bath  before 
dinner.     Like   the   healthy  Spartan   that   he  is,  the 
Englishman   in   this   mood   regards   with   wholesome 
disgust  the  merest  flavour  of  Attic  salt.     Attic  salt 
partially  paralyses  his  papillce,  scarcely  keeping  their 
virtue   unimpaired   for   the   detection   of   the   proper 
bouquet  of  lusty  port.     With  no  necessity,  therefore, 
of   thinking,   in  the  shadow  of  a  Church  and  State 
that  thinks  for  you,   a  Church  whose  bells,  on  each 
periodic  Sunday,  multitudinously  applaud  the  achieve- 
ments  of  dignified  and  self-sufficient  England,   and 
while   there   are   so  many  legitimate   and   obviously 
superior  interests  in  the  open  air,  wooing  river,  paw- 
ing   horses,    eager    hounds,    England    proudly    rests 
content  —  and   who   can   wonder?  —  in   the   strength 
and  dignity  she  has  secured  for  herself  by  her  own 
unaided  efforts.     With   little   capability  of   detecting 
the   drift   in   society   and   hi   events,   the  streams  of 
social   tendency  with  the  rise   of   the  people,   she  is 
quite   unharassed   by   the   worry   of   these   questions 
until  they  press  and  cry  indecorously  for   attention. 
When  at  last  actually  this  time  has  come,    England 
grips  all  such  problems  one  by  one  as  they  advance, 
and  considers  them  with  an  extraordinary  steadiness 

of  intent  vision,    and   an   admirable  and  painstaking 

5 


66  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

caution.  But  the  word  "  cautious  "  as  applied  to  the 
English  is  surely  the  ethical  name  merely  for  a  cer- 
tain wise  inertia.  Yet  the  quality  is  one  of  many 
indications  of  England's  practical  sense  and  worldly 
wisdom.  All  history  is  compromise.  But  English 
history  is  marked  by  compromise  more  particularly 
than  any  other,  although  few  histories  can  boast  of 
being  less  "  compromising. " 

Pre-eminently,  England's  instinct  is  to  be  fair. 
Her  history  has  been  a  long  struggle  towards  equity. 
But  the  English  character,  while  sworn  in  the  long 
run  to  justice,  partakes  also  of  —  nay,  I  may  say  glories 
in  —  a  more  general  and  not  less  admirable  quality 
of  human  nature,  selfishness.  The  combination  and 
co-operation  of  these  two  ideals,  to  be  selfish,  — 
which  we  have  always  cultivated  beyond  the  mere 
needs  of  self-preservation,  wherever  we  English  have 
lived  in  the  world, — and  the  peculiar  English  sense  of 
justice  and  fair-play,  which  seems  to  suffer  deterioration 
away  from  the  island,  explain  the  distinctive  charac- 
ter of  English  history.  That  portion  of  English  society 
which  is  the  heir  of  the  feudal  lord  has  always  been 
aware  that  sooner  or  later  the  old  order  supporting  it 
would  change.  But  the  problem,  born  of  a  natural 
conservative  desire,  has  been  how  most  slowly  to  ac- 
complish this  change ;  how  long  it  is  feasible  and  pos- 
sible to  postpone  the  inevitable.  An  Englishman 


67 

ordinarily  finds  the  old  ways  sufficient  for  his  purpose. 
English  country  roads,  bordered  by  hedgerows  of 
honeysuckle,  blackberry,  and  May,  are  grooves  deep- 
worn.  The  changes  from  feudalism  to  the  divine 
right  of  kings;  from  the  absolute  monarchy  of  the 
Stuarts  to  the  constitutional  government  of  the  suc- 
cession ;  the  social  and  political  revolutions  marked  by 
the  Reform  Bills,  the  Corn  Laws,  the  Municipal  Cor- 
poration and  the  Education  Acts,  —  of  all  these 
changes  or  measures  none  was  undertaken  till  the 
conditions  of  each  time  became  so  literally  intolerable 
as  to  force  the  questions  to  serious  and  final  issue. 
Then  the  Englishman  of  convention  listened  to  the 
dictates  of  the  Englishman  of  sanity  and  worldly  wis- 
dom, and  recognized  the  soundness  of  the  latter's 
advice  to  play  for  a  time  his  long-unaccustomed,  but 
not  unnatural,  role  of  Sir  Giles  Eairplay,  the  English- 
man of  justice.  The  political  sagacity  of  Englishmen 
may  be  summed  up  in  their  firm  conviction  that  a 
stitch  just  in  time  saves  nine;  and  whatever  political 
chagrin  they  have  suffered  has  arisen  from  a  neglect  of 
this  principle,  which  they  know  the  value  of  really 
better  than  any  other  people  in  the  world. 

For  men,  therefore,  who  have  thought  too  enthu- 
siastically ahead  of  them  or  before  their  time,  England 
may  justly  be  said  to  be  as  small  as  it  looks.  The 
case  seems,  then  to  afford  a  pretty  paradox,  in  which 


68  PATRIOTISM   AND   SCIENCE. 

I  see  again  a  Spartan  parallel.  The  existing  liberty 
of  action  seems  in  no  way  commensurate  with  the 
liberty  allowed  in  thought.  Here  is  the  result  of  a 
philosophy  giving  the  direct  lie  to  the  Socratic  prin- 
ciple that  virtue  is  knowledge.  England  has  defended 
this  position  with  a  certain  wilfulness  and  —  may  I 
add?  —  pretence.  There  is  no  god  but  Convention, 
and  Compromise  is  his  prophet :  so  runs  the  English 
Koran.  Progress  must  come,  but  let  its  advance  be 
decorous.  Righteousness,  English  righteousness,  has 
been  obedience  to  the  strict,  straight  lines  of  Church 
and  State.  There  is  something  pre-Christian,  theo- 
cratic, early  Jewish,  about  this.  Righteousness  and 
religion  have  been  separated  in  the  English  from 
personal  convictions;  thus  separated,  they  become  a 
thing  apart,  and,  by  an  optical  illusion,  a  good  in  them- 
selves, a  sacred  thing,  without  vital  human  relation- 
ship. We  thus  get  the  anomaly  of  the  inhabitants  of 
an  entire  island  affirming  their  belief  and  trust  in  a 
host  of  traditions,  superstitions,  or  old-time  rules,  po- 
litical, religious,  social,  quite  beyond  which  nine-tenths 
of  the  individual  members  composing  the  community 
have  carried  their  thought,  and  which  in  their  own  in- 
dividual thinking  they  do  not  for  one  moment  take  into 
account.  This  is  a  sublime  and  ornamental  hypocrisy, 
which  England  shares  with  the  old  Israel  and  the  Eome 
of  the  earlier  Caesars.  Were  it  not  at  present  so 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  69 

general  as  to  be  thoroughly  well  understood,  it  might 
be  morally  injurious.  But,  as  it  is,  its  existence  is 
always  silently  and  mutually  taken  for  granted;  and 
thus,  there  being  really  no  deception,  it  has  rarely 
brought  down  the  destructive  wrath  of  the  avenging 
gods.  Among  the  Northern  States  of  America  such 
hypocrisy  is  not  a  national  sin.  But  this  is  because 
his  clothes,  for  the  most  part,  still  fit  the  Englishman 
there.  The  England  of  the  island  clings  fondly  to  the 
old  bottles,  while  New  England  had  in  most  cases  to 
make  new  ones,  and  is  without  the  former's  temptations 
to  vamp  the  old.  In  England  hypocrisy  is  innocuous 
because  pervasive  and  an  element  in  all  men's  cal- 
culations. It  is  the  tax  respectability  lays  upon  her 
children  for  being  the  sons  of  their  mother,  thus  tak- 
ing advantage  of  their  loyalty ;  and  it  is  a  tax  appar- 
ently very  easy  to  be  borne.  New  England  and  the 
Western  States  of  the  United  States  which  sprang  from 
her  loins  have  scarcely  developed  hypocrisy,  because, 
in  the  first  place,  these  people  could  more  easily  man- 
age, whenever  they  have  wakened  to  the  necessity,  to 
throw  off  the  incubus  of  their  many  odious  theoretical 
rules  of  life,  since  the  rules  are  not  so  heavily  weighted 
by  authority  in  America  as  in  England;  moreover, 
their  quality  has  not  been  tried  as  yet,  and,  for  the 
most  part,  what  conventions,  social  or  religious,  they 
did  take  with  them,  they  still,  in  the  sweet  innocence 


70  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

of  their  hearts,  believe  in,  not  having  thought  so  far 
afield  as  the  Englishman  of  the  island.  When  they 
do  begin  to  think,  frequently  they  express  themselves 
in  the  worst  possible  form.  Colonel  Ingersoll,  as  a 
writer  on  religion,  would  be  heard  as  little  of  in  Eng- 
land as  Mr.  Bradlaugh;  but  in  North  America,  both 
to  the  honour  and  the  dishonour  of  the  people,  he 
created  once  a  Satanic  uproar.  This  simply  meant 
that  to  large  bodies  of  people  there  his  ideas  were  an 
appreciable  and  novel  attraction,  and  that  such  follow- 
ers had  not  the  habit  of  criticism  and  culture  to  see 
the  whole  bearing  of  his  contentions.  His  impatience, 
his  lack  of  perspective,  his  style  of  hue  and  cry,  ex- 
actly suited  them.  The  little  knowledge  of  the  host 
of  readers  in  North  America  eager  for  wisdom  speaks 
out  with  a  blatant  sincerity  which  drives  hypocrisy 
crouching  to  a  corner  of  the  wall.  Few  of  them  could 
understand  how  in  a  certain  state  hypocrisy  has  be- 
come a  virtue,  or  at  least  a  tolerated  and  even  culti- 
vated habit  of  mind,  and  that  that  state  is  the  admir- 
able England  of  Doric  reticence  and  compromise. 

Some  of  the  more  agreeable  features  among  the  is- 
land social  customs  most  appreciated  by  foreigners, 
especially  by  the  New  English,  arise  from  this  national 
characteristic  of  self-sufficiency,  this  Doric  reticence 
and  insular  provincialism.  An  illustration  in  point 
is  the  average  treatment  of  the  guest  in  a  country 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  71 

house.  To  put  guests  at  their  ease  should,  I  imagine, 
be  the  great  aim  of  entertainment;  and  how  charm- 
ingly is  this  end  accomplished  in  England!  This 
ability  has  an  air  of  being  inborn;  but  it  frequently 
arises,  not  from  a  sense  of  fitness  and  true  politeness, 
as  when  seen  in  New  Englishmen,  but  really  from  the 
isolating  racial  selfishness  by  virtue  of  which  an  indi- 
vidual member  of  society,  insisting  upon  being  let  alone 
himself,  readily  allows  others,  by  the  mere  device  of  neg- 
lect, the  same  pleasure.  The  plan  works  well,  it  works 
naturally.  And  the  opposite  ideal  of  social  entertain- 
ment seen  in  New  England,  and  equally  inalienable 
from  the  blood  as  there  developing,  works  only  with 
friction, —  the  tactless  struggle,  I  mean,  to  render 
oneself  agreeable,  the  nervous  anxiety  a  guest  is  al- 
most sure  to  encounter  in  a  host  who  fears  that  he 
may  suffer  from  ennui  if  every  moment  be  not  filled 
for  him.  This  is  almost  capable  of  becoming  exas- 
perating ;  it  renders  the  average  relation  in  New  Eng- 
lish society  almost  intolerable  to  one  who  has  tasted 
the  delightful  independence  of  the  unencumbered 
hours  in  an  English  country  house.  But  whatever 
the  results  may  be,  are  not  the  causes  such  as  given  ? 
The  Englishman,  with  a  state  all  terraced  with  so- 
cieties of  philanthropy,  is  at  heart  as  little  of  the  Good 
Samaritan  as  the  New  English  Voltaire,  Franklin. 
Englishmen  appear  to  fill  the  mountain  road,  healing 


72  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

volcanoes  of  sores  on  thousands  of  beggars.  All  the 
time,  Arnold  Toynbee  and  the  rest  aside,  —  all  the 
time,  at  heart  and  as  a  nation,  not  from  ill-will,  but 
from  mere  inertia,  they  are  eager  to  pass  by  on  the 
other  side.  On  the  contrary,  the  American  is  more 
genuinely  generous  and  flexible.  The  generosity  of 
his  brother  of  the  island  is  still  Puritan,  and  largely 
takes  the  form  of  a  sop  to  a  growling  conscience,  which 
may  be  ignored  during  the  process  of  digestion.  But 
I  would  not  presume  to  judge  whether  or  not  it  is 
better  to  toss  the  sop  to  conscience  than  to  convention. 
In  considering  so  curiously  this  English  characteris- 
tic marked  by  the  agreeable  custom  I  have  cited,  I 
willingly  plead  guilty  to  all  manner  of  frankness  in 
indulging  in  praise  more  bitter-sweet  than  sweet. 
But  if  this  seem  quite  scientifically  outspoken,  much 
more,  I  fear,  will  be  the  wider  illustration  it  occurs  to 
me  now  to  give.  My  friend  who  compared  the  Ex- 
odus of  the  people  of  the  United  States  to  England 
with  the  classical  Eeturn  of  the  Prodigal  Son  probably 
was  not  aware  of  the  full  significance  of  the  fact  ex- 
pressed so  epigrainmatically  in  the  remark  from  which 
he  drew  his  insular  conclusion ;  but  of  the  fact  there 
can  be  no  doubt.  The  banished  English  race,  if  it 
really  get  to  know  England,  likes  it.  And  English- 
men "  take  to  Americans, "  as  the  phrase  goes.  This 
is  a  highly  entertaining  fact,  and  not  unsignificant. 


ENGLISH   AND   "AMERICANS."  73 

I  hear  "  Americans  "  in  London  constantly  asserting 
that  they  like  to  be  there.  They  regard  it  as  the 
most  "  livable  "  city  in  the  world,  and  England,  of 
which  London  is  the  eye,  the  most  "  livable "  of 
countries.  An  Englishman,  listening  to  this  praise, 
is  intensely  gratified;  and  more  than  ever  does  he 
regard  England  as  the  centre  of  the  solar  system. 
Laudari  a  viro  laudato,  to  be  praised  by  the  praised, 
Cicero  says  somewhere,  quoting  from  another,  is  a 
keen,  a  very  keen,  satisfaction.  And  it  is  an  agreeable 
titillation  for  the  English  paterfamilias  to  know  that 
the  children  enjoy,  when  they  return  to  it,  the  warmth 
and  the  big  logs  and  the  enticing  settle  of  the  old  fire- 
side. He  expects  it  is  a  comforting  compliment  (for 
this  is  the  very  word,  I  am  sorry  to  say,  that  he  uses, 
believing  himself  to  be  speaking  correctly  the  undefiled 
tongue  of  his  fathers),  but  he  did  not  dare  to  be  un- 
prepared for  disappointment.  However  unlikely  he 
would  be  to  confess  it,  he  is  really  proud  of  his  errant 
child  of  energy.  The  "  American  "  compliments  him 
simply  by  being  American.  The  American  accent 
i  and  intonation  are  intolerable  to  him ;  but  the  fund  of 
life  the  American  carries  with  him  is  exhilarating  in 
England.  He  is  like  a  boy  coming  back  to  the  aged 
father  and  mother  and  brushing  up  the  wits  of  the  old 
people.  The  father  believes  that  he  forgets  more 
nightly  than  the  boy  has  ever  known;  but  the 


74  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

freshness  of  the  boy's  points  of  view,  the  depth  and 
speed  of  his  intuition,  the  engaging  power  of  quaint 
suggestion,  the  inevitable  alertness  of  mind,  the 
buoyancy  and  enthusiasm  of  his  average  mood,  — all 
these  characteristics  and  qualities  are  so  unexpected, 
so  fresh  and  helpful,  that  the  father  cannot  but  ad- 
mire, although  he  may  be  a  good  deal  shocked.  The 
Doric  Englishman  has  become  in  America  both  Ionic 
and  Corinthian;  and  there  is  no  evidence  that  Sparta 
ever  failed  secretly  to  admire  Athens  or  Corinth,  how- 
ever much  she  thought  it  her  duty  to  disapprove  of 
their  gods. 

Wherever  we  finally  turn  to  account  for  the  fact, 
to  the  atmosphere  or  the  amalgamation  of  varied  races, 
or,  in  general,  to  the  total  change  in  the  environment, 
the  fact  itself  will  go  unquestioned.  The  American 
of  New  England  and  the  West,  —  for  New  England, 
roughly  speaking,  is  a  more  distinctive  and  original 
English  colony  than  the  Virginias,  —  starting  as  an 
Englishman,  has  become  in  two  centuries  and  a  half 
a  variant  species,  a  new  being.  He  seems  making,  at 
his  best,  towards  an  ideal  type  midway  between  the 
Frenchman  and  his  own  English  forefathers.  And 
now  he  comes  back  into  the  parent  nest  something  of , 
a  cuckoo,  except  that  he  creates  amusement  rather 
than  menacing  annoyance.  The  Englishman  liked 
him  a  "  little  bit, "  and  he  is  devoted  to  the  English-j 


ENGLISH   AND   "AMERICANS."  75 

man.     What  it  all  means  I  shall  certainly  not  under- 
take to  tell, 

To  an  Englishman  the  world  beyond  the  boundaries 
of  his  isle  —  and  America  and  the  Colonies  are 
more  truly  so  than  other  parts  of  the  planet  —  is  in- 
habited by  barbarians,  just  as  Dacia  or  Italy  or  Persia 
was  to  the  Greek.  In  Athens  it  is  easy  to  please  the 
Athenians.  Aspasia  proved  it  in  an  eloquent  bit  of 
satirical  rhetoric  in  Plato's  Menexenus,  and  I  have 
heard  it  proved  in  New  England  to  New  Englishmen 
ad  nauseam  in  too  many  a  Fourth  of  July  oration. 
England's  Parliament  proves  it  nightly  to  the  satisfac- 
tion of  the  readers  of  the  Times.  But  the  national 
pride  of  the  United  States,  which  has  grown  with  the 
sense  of  achievement  in  the  difficult  process  of  work- 
ing out  its  own  salvation,  differs  widely  in  its  char- 
acter from  the  national  pride  of  England,  although 
both  thrive  on  the  glorious  memories  of  portions  of 
their  past  history.  All  the  world,  and  especially  the 
American  and  Colonial  world,  I  have  said,  the  Eng- 
lishman thinks  barbarian.  Yet,  after  all,  America  is 
not  quite  barbarian  to  him,  for  it  is  only  boyish, 
immature.  The  Englishman  of  North  America  might 
not  be  blamed  for  preferring  the  dubious  company  of 
the  barbarians  to  the  acceptance  of  the  conventional 
distinction  of  the  other  classification.  His  sole  com- 
fort —  I  do  not  for  one  moment  deny  or  assert  that 


76  PATRIOTISM   AND   SCIENCE. 

this  is  enough  —  is  in  knowing  that  very  likely  he  is 
an  Englishman  scaled  of  a  good  many  prejudices  and 
longer-sighted.  But  the  natural  language  of  the  Eng- 
lish national  pride  is,  "  Leave  England,  and  you  leave 
civilisation  behind  you."  This  is  a  tune  played  in 
England  with  variations.  Whatever  urbanity  of  man- 
ner England  enjoys  has  been  taken  on  only  because  it 
was  found  necessary,  for  any  sort  of  success  in  the 
carrying  out  of  her  own  policy,  to  veil  her  two  chief 
characteristics,  brutal  energy  and  honest  directness, 
in  an  ingratiating  air  of  manners.  This  is  the  whole- 
some result  of  England's  contact  with  the  great  world. 
The  Shaftesbury  who  was  the  author  of  the  Charac- 
teristics, one  of  the  most  urbane  and  un-English  of 
English  gentlemen,  and  the  best  critic  of  his  time, 
has  said :  "  All  politeness  is  owing  to  liberty.  We 
polish  one  another,  and  rub  off  our  corners  and  rough 
sides  by  this  amiable  collision. "  Yet  the  manners  of 
England,  which  are  the  social  conventions  of  her  own 
political  organism,  are  admirably  adapted  to  the  island 
itself.  That  outside  of  England  they  serve  little  pur- 
pose, so  that  beyond  the  limits  of  his  own  shores  the 
Englishman  is  always  at  sea,  is  not  perhaps  so  serious 
a  fault.  But  then  outside  it  is  that  the  self-suffi- 
ciency, brutal  energy,  and  honest  directness  come  ob- 
trusively to  the  fore.  But  in  directness  and  all  the 
useful  qualities  of  honesty  and  energy  and  courage  and 


77 

pluck  and  singleness  of  purpose  and  simplicity  that 
flow  from  it  or  are  akin  to  it,  where  is  there  a  man 
that  can  vie  with  him?  In  becoming  cosmopolitan, 
he  has  managed  somehow  to  get  a  show  of  manners, 
learned  a  craft  not  quite  natural  to  him,  and  lost  some- 
thing of  his  directness  and  honesty.  But  though  the 
changes  of  the  last  half-century  have  been  so  great,  he 
is  still  a  Dorian,  —  still  he  scorns  deceit  and  meanness. 
He  hates  guilelessness,  but  equally  detests  the  wily. 
Evasion  and  circumlocution  are  not  his  habit.  There- 
fore he  is  not  prepared  for  the  often  Jesuitical  quality 
of  French  subtlety,  or  the  as  frequent  New  English 
characteristic  of  chicane.  If  there  is  one  thing  he  dis- 
likes more  than  another,  it  is  the  uncanny  canniness 
of  people  who  are  too  clever.  Facts  and  plodding  are 
his  province,  and  no  one  manipulates  facts  so  well. 
I  see  wide- fields  in  the  domain  of  English  ethical 
philosophy  and  its  alien  metaphysics  opening  up  if  I 
could  but  enter  on  them.  So  that  it  takes  more  facts 
to  convince  the  island  English  than  any  other  nation, 
and  the  defect  of  this  temperament  is  the  failure  to 
recognize  that  facts  can  ever  lie.  A  Frenchman 
knows  this,  and  always  counts  upon  it.  For  French 
finesse  the  English  have  no  weapons  so  delicate.  And 
for  those  New  English  characteristics,  by  reason  of 
which  Proteus  should  have  altars  erected  to  him  in 
the  New  English  market-places,  the  alertness,  adapt- 


78  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

ability,  buoyancy,  or,  in  their  exaggerated  forms, 
bumptiousness  and  shrewdness  and  smartness,  they 
have  an  envious  appreciation  although  they  look  at 
times  so  primly  askance,  —  an  appreciation  that  passes 
into  a  positive  craving  for  more  matter  equally  amus- 
ing. So  "  Americans  "  they  have  cultivated  and  flat- 
tered and  entertained  royally,  if  often  in  the  manner 
patronising,  But  not  being  critics,  they  have  made 
little  distinction  between  "  Americans  ;  "  they  have 
not  been  careful  respecters  of  persons.  They  ran  after 
the  late  Mr.  Lowell  and  "  Buffalo  Bill "  with  equal 
energy ;  and  the  latter,  I  am  sure,  with  the  greater  in- 
terest. Both  were  flattered,  and  came  again.  And 
yet  this  is  so  admirably  different  from  the  way  the 
Athenians  mobbed  a  philosopher  of  Megara,  who  was 
keenly  interested  in  the  great  innovator,  Socrates,  and 
journeyed  once  all  the  way  across  the  Thriasian  Plain, 
and  up  over  the  hills  through  the  olive-groves  of  At- 
tica, to  violet-crowned  Athens,  just  to  visit  him  and 
learn  from  him.  But  that  was  at  a  time  when  Megara 
had  no  commercial  market,  and  wished  in  vain  for 
free-trade.  It  is  the  immense  ennui  of  their  routine 
lives  that  troubles  the  English,  and  makes  them  re- 
joice at  the  freshness  of  Americans.  Americans  to 
the  English  are  a  new  sensation. 

But  it  is  this  very  habit  of  convention,  and  this  un- 
deviating  routine  against  which  at  heart  the  island  Eng- 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  79 


lish  chafe,  and  by  reason  of  which  they  are  so  willing 
to  welcome  any  manifestation  of  freedom  in  others,  any 
evidence  of  absence  of  conventional  restraint,  when 
they  are  not  asked  to  be  pert  nonconformists  too,  that 
makes  England  so  fascinating  and  restful  a  country  to 
the  New  Englishman  or  the  Englishman  of  the  Col- 
onies. The  Englishman  of  the  New  Worlds  is  like  a 
cat  in  possessing  nine  lives  and  a  clever  habit  of  alight- 
ing in  every  fall  upon  his  feet.  The  Englishman,  not 
because  he  is  too  nice  and  delicate,  but  because  he  is 
not  so  easily  adaptable,  being  used  to  one  authoritative 
way  of  life  prescribed  by  Church,  Society,  and  State, 
is  like  glass  or  flowers,  which,  when  moved,  must 
always  be  moved  "right  side  up,  with  care."  But 
American  versatility  and  vivacity  are  contagious;  and 
every  one  in  the  United  States  is  a  chameleon.  The 
pitch  of  American  life  is  at  fever  heat.  Busied  in 
the  struggle  to  live,  it  becomes  a  second  nature  to  the 
American  to  live  fast;  and  under  the  strain  of  the 
nervous  tension  he  breaks  utterly  down  in  health  be- 
fore any  of  his  European  neighbours.  His  aim  is  not, 
as  often  in  England,  to  get  money  enough  to  live  in 
such  a  way  as  to  live  well.  He  does  not  recognise 
that  the  only  good  of  money  is  to  buy  leisure  to  be 
wise,  but,  with  eye  fast  fixed  upon  the  coin  itself, 
the  dazed  vision  magnifies  it  into  a  good  for  its  own 
sake.  In  America,  on  the  whole,  money  is  at  present 


80  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

the  chief  condition  of  power.  By  money  man  is 
enabled  there  to  crane  himself  above  the  dead  level 
of  uniformity.  Hence,  in  general,  America  has  not 
reached  the  point  that  England  long  ago  attained,  in 
which  it  can  afford  to  cultivate  other  gods  than  Mam. 
mon.  This  is,  I  show  farther  on,  not  without  its 
fortunate  results;  but  the  unpleasant  fact  is  that 
with  such  an  ideal  and  such  a  cult  arise  too  often 
sordidness  of  likings  in  the  worshippers,  and  medioc- 
rity, if  not  actual  vulgarity,  of  aspiration, — too  often, 
that  is,  apart  from  the  narrow-minded  university  cen- 
tres of  culture  and  from  the  sections  dominated  by  piety 
and  the  churches.  But  the  piety  of  the  churches, 
while  sincere,  is  of  course  quite  lacking  in  culture; 
whereas  in  England  hypocrisy  has  often  sesthetic  or 
patriotic  sanction,  and  is  attended  with  inviting  allure- 
ments. New  Englishmen  thank  God  that  they  have 
"  a  Church  without  a  bishop,  and  a  State  without  a 
king ;  "  so  that  certain  temptations  not  to  think  which 
are  natural  to  England  do  not  there  entice.  The 
United  States  pretends  to  fewer  social  shackles  and 
fewer  superstitions  than  any  country  in  the  world ;  but 
what  it  has  are  more  galling  and  oppressive  than  any  hi 
England.  "  We  hold  these  truths  to  be  self-evident, " 
says  its  Declaration  of  Independence,  "  that  all  men 
are  created  equal."  This  assertion,  as  profoundly 
false  as  it  is  profoundly  true,  pervades  all  her  institu- 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  81 


tions,  and  is  dangerously  caviare  to  the  general.  For 
not  all  Americans  have  by  any  means  as  yet  recog- 
nised that  only  men  who  are  equal  are  equal;  that 
there  are  degrees  of  worth,  and  thus  degrees  of  legiti- 
mate superiority,  and  consequently  of  desert  and  social 
rank,  but  a  rank  of  which  taste  ought  to  be  the  gauge. 
The  truth  in  this  utterance  which  they  do  appreciate  is 
its  insistence  upon  the  inalienable  right  of  every  man 
to  be  himself,  and  to  work  out  his  own  salvation,  and 
its  rejection  of  anything  like  the  English  notion  that 
the  individual  must  content  himself  with  smiling 
labour,  however  arduous,  in  the  lot  to  which  he  is 
called  and  in  which  he  is  born. 

But  however  strong  may  be  the  belief  throughout 
the  United  States  of  North  America  in  man's  inalien- 
able right  of  liberty,  the  belief  does  not  appear  to 
have  that  general  vitality  we  should  have  expected. 
The  religious  and  social  restrictions  that  exist  there, 
though  infinitely  fewer  than  those  in  England  in  the 
written  statute  books  of  the  island  and  in  the  un- 
written laws  of  the  national  goddess  Kespectability 
and  her  prophet,  are  not,  like  English  restrictions, 
which  are  for  the  most  part  paper  conventions,  easily 
ignored  in  practice,  and  thus  prolific  of  hypocrisy, 
but  arbitrarily  tyrannical  formulas  of  the  strictest 
sort,  most  unfavourable  to  the  development  of  indivi- 
duality, and  rendering  a  special,  independent  life  all 


82  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

but  impossible.  This  tyranny  is  not  felt  so  much 
in  the  expression  of  one's  political  convictions,  but 
it  is  shamefully  exacting  in  social  and  religious  life. 
In  the  rank  and  file  of  the  churches  in  New  England 
intolerance  is  still  grievously  rife,  so  that  the  average 
Methodist,  for  instance,  or  Baptist,  could  never,  even 
in  the  covert  silence  of  his  own  rash  musings,  logically 
wish  a  hateful  Unitarian  or  Universalist  in  "hell," 
because  his  profound  belief  is  quite  at  one  with  his 
professed  creed  that  they  are  already  doomed,  and  his 
interest  in  the  matter  would  be  utterly  superfluous. 
In  England,  where,  if  Englishmen  practised  in  all 
sincerity  what  the  Prayer-book  preaches,  intolerance 
should  be  far  more  general  and  savage,  as  a  matter 
of  fact  it  is  far  less  frequent.  Indeed,  religious 
intolerance  pure  and  simple  may  be  said  scarcely  to 
exist  at  all,  whatever  distrust  there  is  of  the  Non- 
conformist being  distinctly  a  political  affair.  But 
the  Prayer-book  offers  a  most  convenient  code  to  fall 
back  upon  as  a  means  for  the  inclusive  instruction 
of  children  and  the  lower  classes.  In  England,  for 
the  most  part,  servants  are  born  servants,  and  must 
die  servants,  and  need  not  complain,  for  they  are  a 
different  race,  happy  helots  in  the  Spartan  realm. 
In  a  land  where  no  man  is  born  a  servant,  or,  if  he 
has  been,  runs  the  risk  some  day  of  being  President  of 
his  country,  it  is  obvious,  and  to  the  English  traveller 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  83 

it  will  often  be  painfully,  obnoxiously  obvious,  that 
there  must  frequently  be  a  vast  deal  of  prevalent 
vulgarity  in  self-assertion,  and  annoying  friction,  and 
loud-mouthed  jarring  of  dissonant  advisers.  Such  is 
indeed  the  case  in  the  North  America  of  to-day. 
But  the  fact  is  of  the  highest  significance.  In  the 
United  States  of  North  America  to-day  there  are 
more  human  beings  with  a  growing  sense  of  their 
own  worth  as  men,  more  individual  human  beings 
with  sense  of  "  self,."  than  have  ever  before  been  con- 
gregated in  history.  Almost  all  the  deficiencies  and 
disadvantages  of  these  people  seem  capable  of  being 
interpreted  as  necessary  evils;  so  that  at  present 
the  undoubted  "  lack  of  distinction  "  which  was  re- 
corded by  the  late  Matthew  Arnold  is  really  a  great 
distinction.  The  ideal  aim  of  civilisation,  it  is  argu- 
able, is  the  fullest  general  development  of  individuality 
in  all  the  members  of  the  nation.  But  the  process 
is  painful  in  a  high  degree;  and  a  nation  in  the 
stress  and  strain  of  such  development  is  not  a  pleas- 
ant place  for  people  of  delicate  organism  or  too  nice 
nerves  to  live  in.  But  the  critic  who,  noting  the 
application  of  this  truth  to  America,  stops  at  the  fact 
without  explaining  it  or  determining  the  prophecy  in 
it,  is  too  lazy  to  think.  It  should  be  pointed  out 
that  the  unrest,  the  absence  of  taste,  the  reaching 
after  new  ideas,  the  self-assertion,  the  youthful  con- 


84  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

fidence  and  bounce,  are  all  inevitable  characteristics 
most  likely  to  be  outgrown,  unless  some  cataclysm 
engulf  the  entire  proud  Korah's  troop  of  these  States, 
and  swallow  them  on  their  far  Atlantis,  away  into 
oblivion,  where  Destiny  can  no  longer  experiment 
with  them.  These  States  to-day  certainly  mark  a 
farther  general  advance  in  civilisation,  however,  than 
has  yet  been  attained.  There  is  a  more  pervasive 
individual  life  there,  a  greater  general  power  of  the 
imagination,  and  a  higher  average  individual  devel- 
opment, than  in  any  country  in  the  world.  But  if 
this  be  true  of  the  average,  the  highest  quality  is 
much  rarer  than  in  England.  I  hasten  to  record, 
however,  that  the  comparison  of  English  and  New 
English  history  in  these  respects,  recalling  as  they 
do  the  Athens  of  refinement  made  possible  by  slavery, 
and  quite  another  fact  in  human  development  so 
distinct,  so  astoundingly  distinct,  as  that  of  the 
French  Revolution,  leaves  open  the  whole  problem 
of  the  destiny  of  our  civilisation,  and  not  merely 
what  we  shall  come  to  be  as  a  race,  but  what  we 
ought  to  wish  to  be,  —  an  even  more  curious  and 
pressing  inquiry  still.  Off  against  the  wonderful 
ideal  truth  that  the  Revolution  of  France  wrote  in 
blood  on  the  pages  of  history,  stands  the  other  truth 
taught  in  the  record  of  the  English  island,  that,  in 
the  words  of  Joubert,  subordination  is  a  better 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  85 

tiling  than  independence.  "Liberty,  liberty,"  he 
cries,  "  in  all  things  let  us  have  justice,  and  we  shall 
have  enough  liberty. "  And  this  has  been  England. 
So  that  with  these  great  contrasts  in  our  minds, 
how  much  there  is  for  us  to  think  about,  over  how 
much  have  we  to  ponder!  We  almost  find  the  ques- 
tion of  the  ultimate  hope,  the  ultimate  aim,  far  too 
involved,  too  remote,  for  speculation  even;  and  we 
return  to  surer  ground  in  such  assertions,  for  in- 
stance, as  that  in  the  United  States  the  small  rem- 
nant is  what  we  should  have  expected.  With  more 
ideas  as  a  nation  than  the  English  of  the  island,  if 
less  than  the  French,  the  Englishman  of  America  is 
fortunate  in  having  more  self-control  than  the  latter, 
and  more  repose.  He  is  more  sympathetic  and  more 
appreciative  than  the  island  Englishman.  But,  of 
course,  a  people  waking  to  a  knowledge  of  itself  is 
not  a  tractable  monster.  Its  millions  of  heads  mean 
each  a  thinking  brain  liable  to  entangle  its  Briarean 
arms.  Here  is  horror  and  anarchy  in  germ.  His 
Holiness  the  Zeit-Geist  seems  very  foolhardy,  it  must 
be  owned,  to  try  so  uncertain  and  strange  a  game. 

England,  therefore,  to  a  New  Englishman  is  a 
fair  land  flowing  with  milk  and  honey,  where  he 
may  rest  his  tired  eyes  and  weary  brain.  Here, 
after  all  the  uproar  of  his  home,  is  dignity  and 
strength  and  charm.  All  the  relics  of  feudalism 


86  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

exercise  upon  the  foreigner  of  English  blood  their 
spell.  All  over  the  land  he  hears  the  whispering 
of  immemorial  elms.  He  walks  in  Druid  groves  or 
on  the  earthworks  of  Danish  camps.  It  is  not  the 
Church  alone  that  is  established.  Every  English  in- 
stitution seems  to  stand  upon  a  pyramid  base  that 
cannot  be  shaken.  All  the  land  is  fair,  as  it  rolls, 
and  well  tilled  to  the  horizon.  Not  only  is  it  like  a 
gentleman's  park,  it  is  really  such,  —  the  playground 
of  grand  feudal  lords  in  the  pay  of  Poseidon,  who 
boast  in  their  addresses  to  their  retainers  of  Eng. 
land's  dominion  of  the  sea,  and  of  the  glories  of  her 
world-encircling  commerce,  but  neglect  to  mention 
that,  in  compensation  for  these  splendid  distinctions, 
England's  fruit-trees  run  a  danger  of  being  left  to 
wither,  and  her  fields  of  going  unproductive.  Fruit 
may  be  had  from  the  Channel  Islands,  grain  from 
the  United  States,  eggs,  chickens,  vegetables,  from 
the  Continent.  The  individual  English  farmer  seems 
doomed.  If  gentlemen  have  money  to  buy  products 
from  abroad,  their  own  fields  they  may  polish  into 
parks.  Hare  and  deer,  and  grouse  and  pheasant, 
and  wood-pigeon  and  partridges  were  all  created  for 
the  glory  of  England.  Adam,  bless  him,  gave  them 
English  names.  The  foreigner  of  English  blood, 
however,  who  is  a  long  time  learning  this,  would  be 
a  fool  to  quarrel  with  this  paradise  in  which  he  finds 


ENGLISH   AND   "AMERICANS."  87 

himself  so  comfortably  at  home,  and  so  well  treated 
when  he  arrives.  For  England  is  the  prettiest  coun- 
try in  the  world.  The  misty  air  which  hovers  over 
it,  and  on  the  slightest  provocation  touches  it  with 
softening  blue,  seems  charged  with  opiates.  England, 
summer  England,  is  a  Circe's  garden,  where  the 
passing  traveller  never  gets  even  a  single  revealing 
whiff  from  the  stagnant  pools  of  slime  in  the  pig- 
sties so  carefully  hidden.  The  wind  never  blows 
from  that  quarter,  for  the  air  above  the  heads  of 
imperial  England  is  never  troubled;  nor  is  there 
much  circulation  or  current  from  below,  —  the  cool, 
conventional,  calm  atmosphere  of  upper  England 
seeming  eternally  satisfying,  nothing  heated  or  mephi- 
tic  ever  rising  to  insult  the  too  nice  nerves  of  those 
who  dwell  above,  or  send  sickening  warning  of  any 
rottenness  beneath.  The  towers  of  Westminster  grow 
daily,  as  one  gazes,  more  and  more  beautiful.  The 
cabs  continue  to  glide  easily  and  cheaply  over  noise- 
less pavements.  Your  tailor  calls  you  "  sir, "  and 
never  asks  for  money,  and  the  school-children  curtsey 
as  they  pass.  The  moonlight  lies  with  beauty  rare 
upon  the  grand  sweep  of  the  Thames  at  Richmond, 
and  sleeps  upon  the  meadows  by  the  stream.  Wind- 
sor, serene,  majestic,  dominates  her  park  with  dignity 
of  far-seen  towers.  The  lanes  of  Devon  wind  and 
wind  between  their  high  hedges  tangled  with  dog- 


88  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

rose  in  curves  of  sweetest  and  most  suggestive  charm. 
Still  over  Bolton  Abbey  climbs  the  ivy,  while  the 
river,  wandering  through  the  peaceful  dale,  murmurs 
memories  of  Wordsworth.  Cathedral  spires  soar, 
and  nightingales  sing,  and  the  gardens  of  Oxford 
bloom  in  sweet  seclusion,  and  the  live  oak  grows  at 
Clovelly  quite  unto  the  iridescent  sea.  And  who 
shall  say  that  England  is  not  fair  1  Against  such  let 
her  church-bells  chime  anathema  !  But  occasionally 
there  are  hateful  murmurs,  as  of  rumbling  earth- 
quakes, of  dock  labourers  on  strike,  and  occasionally 
one  is  forced  to  listen  to  an  anxious  discussion  upon 
Royal  Grants;  and  occasionally  one  hears  the  theatre 
shake  with  the  applause  of  the  people,  the  English 
people,  sanctioning  vociferously  the  motive  of  a  play 
teaching,  as  did  the  Middleman,  the  truth  so  rarely 
true  for  England,  that  the  labourer  is  worthy  of  his 
hire.  Then  England  takes  another  hue;  and  the 
critic  has  new  light  on  Isaiah's  fulminations  and  th( 
stern  Thucydidean  story  of  the  Sicilian  expedition. 

But  meanwhile,  till  the  air  begins  to  circulate  muc 
more  than  at  present,  they  who  can  afford  the 
far  niente  life  will  continue  to  bask  in  the  Englisl 
fields,  and  let  inconvenient  suggestions  alone.     Think- 
ing is  so  troublesome  and  stupid!     But  the  Englisl 
of  the  United  States,  seeing  the  stress  of  the  growii 
problem  of  England,  namely,  how,  in  the  acceptai 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  89 

and  assimilation  of  the  democratic  principle,  she  shall 
hasten,  without  total  collapse  or  serious  and  chronic 
disorder,   the  natural  process  of  transformation,  so 
to  accomplish  in  one  year  what  should  take,  the  ptfy£^.  ^ 
siologists  tell  us,  seven,  need  not  so  speedily  congratu- 
late themselves  upon  their  greater  good-fortune.     The 
problem  there,   which  is  even   of   higher  interest,   is 
no  whit  less   difficult.     The  responsibility  of  vindi-f 
eating  democracy  will  be  upon  the  next  half-century  1 
of  these   American   men.     They  think   their  raison\ 
d'etre  is  proved.     Vain  beating  of  the  eagle  wings! 
The  second  historical  era  of  the  world,   which  began 
with   the   discovery  of  America,   is   passing  into  its 
crisis.     And   to   the  responsibility  of   it  in  America, 
as  well  as  in  England,  but  most  of  all  in  America, 
there  will  be  men  enough  to  rise,  only  so  long  as  they 
continue  clasping  their  hands  below  the  purse-fold  of 
their  gowns,  and  always  looking  about  to  spy  whence 
they  may  get  them  gold !     As  it  is,  thank  fortune,  — 
though  I  am  uttering  a  paradox  that  in  another  place 
I  have  explained,  —  this  age  in  America  does  not  so 
much  differ  from  the  Alexandrian,  of  which  Theocritus 
wrote  that  the  very  rust  of  the  money  was  too  pre- 
cious to  be  rubbed  off  for  a  gift. 

England  despises  France,  and  dislikes  it  because 
she  thinks  it  given  over  to  bawds  and  feminine  bau- 
bles. The  healthy  Englishman  loathes  baubles,  and, 


90  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

if  he  allows  himself  to  traffic  with  the  former,  makes 
a  bestial  business  of  it,  and  not  a  pretty  pleasure  all 
redolent  of  musk.  Englishmen  judge  the  French 
from  their  knowledge  of  Paris,  and  Paris  from  a. 
legendary  cancan.  To  a  Frenchman's  pre-eminent 
accessibility  to  ideas,  his  curiosity,  his  distinction  of 
taste,  England  turns  the  deafest  of  insular  ears.  Be- 
cause France  nutters  and  is  versatile,  even  a  larger 
than  even  the  Philistine  England  damns  it  as  unstable, 
undignified,  and  fickle.  The  generalising  tendency 
of  the  French,  the  lightness  of  their  spirit  and  their 
sympathy,  become  to  England  indications  of  super- 
ficiality. Thus,  because  she  has  not  an  atom  ofr 
respect  for,  and  so  little  knowledge  of,  France, 
French  institutions,  so  lacking  in  the  English  steadi- 
ness and  dignity,  her  democratic  tendencies  so  vari- 
able, so  uncertain,  her  republicanism  so  idealistic,  so 
unpractical,  do  not  appreciably  menace  England. 
And  this  is  an  important  point,  that  while  spiritually 
France  has  her  power,  politically  she  has  been  nil. 
But  in  contrast  with  the  political  inefficiency  of 
France  is  the  strong  influence  of  the  vast  colonial 
English  world.  New  England,  America,  Australia, 
have  never  ceased  to  react  most  powerfully  upon  the 
Mother  Island.  From  the  beginning,  down  through 
Franklin  and  Emerson  and  Sir  Henry  Parkes  to  the 
present  moment,  while  America  seems  to  loom  over 


91 

the  top  of  the  sea,  silently  but  resolutely  and  cer- 
tainly as  Fate,  even  as  a  python  insinuates  itself 
into  the  jungle  and  enfolds  its  prey,  American  and 
colonial  ideals  have  slowly  permeated  English  life; 
how  slowly  indeed  in  this  society  so  impatient  of 
ideas,  and  yet  after  all  really  and  surely!  I  am  not 
sure  if  the  history  of  New  England  be  not  almost 
the  greatest  glory  of  England.  It  should  surely  be 
a  pride  of  New  England  that  its  history  is  the  most 
characteristic  and  significant  in  English  history.  New 
England  will  grow  to  be  content,  nay,  to  rejoice, 
that,  besides  to  the  Lares  of  its  own  hearthstone,  it 
is  drawn  more  strongly  still  to  this  island  beyond  the 
Atlantic  sacred  as  the  home  of  the  race, — a  sacred 
isle,  more  sacred  than  Delos  or  Delphi  or  Pisa  to  the 
Greek,  a  holy  ground  of  relics  and  symbols  and  signs 
and  superstitions,  touched  with  the  melancholy  and 
charm  of  the  evening  light  through  the  western  win- 
dows of  its  grand  cathedrals;  the  ri^cvo^  the  0X1-15, 
the  sacred  enclosure,  of  the  inheritors  of  the  tongue  of 
Shakespeare,  of  Milton,  and  of  Keats,  wherever  they 
breathe  under  the  sun. 

February,  1890. 


92  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 


II. 

A  PROPHET  of  the  United  States  is  not  without 
honour  save  in  his  own  country;  but  it  is  entertain- 
ing, and,  I  may  addx  instructive,  to  note  how  much  his 
countrymen's  real  estimate  of  him  depends  upon  for- 
eign appreciation,  especially  that  of  Englishmen;  and 
therefore  how  rare  is  his  opportunity  for  self -congrat- 
ulation, considering  that  England  has  so  slight  a  re- 
gard for  the  foremost  men,  the  poets  and  prophets, 
beyond  the  Atlantic,  because  so  little  real  knowledge  of 
them.1  Until  to-day,  it  might  almost  have  been  said  of 
North  American  writers,  painters,  sculptors,  that  they 
required  the  stamp  of  European  approval  in  order  to 
attain  a  recognised  place  of  esteem  in  North  American 
opinion.  This  entire  region  even  as  yet  is  not  sure 
of  its  judgments.  But  woe  to  the  Englishman  who 
commits  the  tactless  indiscretion  of  saying  that  this  is 
so.  New  Englishmen,  however,  and  their  brothers  of 
the  West  see  no  reason  for  humbly  impressing  their 
deficiency  upon  others.  While  the  island  English- 
man prefers  to  live  in  a  paradise  of  imperial  pride ,  — 
"  fool's  paradise  "  though  it  may  be,  it  is  still  a  para- 
dise, —  the  American  Englishman,  with  the  assurance 

1 "  La  France  a  souvent  averti  les  Anglais  du  merite  de  leurs 
grands  hommes,"  wrote  De  Fontanes  in  1785  to  Joubert. 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  93 

of  inexperience,  assumes  a  certainty  and  omniscience 
which  he  is  aware  is  not  very  well  founded,  and 
which  can  deceive  nobody  acquainted  with  a  little 
history  and  human  nature.  He  may  admit,  within 
the  privacy  of  his  own  geographical  boundaries  and 
to  other  American  Englishmen,  unsatisfying  things 
about  himself  and  his  fellows;  but,  like  the  island 
English  in  their  assertion  of  their  own  gift  for  domi- 
nance, he  is  not  possessed  of  sufficient  magnanimity 
to  own  the  truth  to  many  others  who  are  not  of  his 
own  kith  and  kin. 

It  is  amusing  to  come  upon  a  characteristic  such  as 
this,  reminiscent  of  the  boyish  inflation  of  the  public 
school,  in  the  attitude  and  bearing  of  States  when  they 
are  forced  to  throw  their  shoulders  back  and  toe  the 
line  of  dignity.  "Nescis,  mi  fili,  quam  parva  cum 
sapientia  regitur  mundus :  "  "  You  have  no  idea,  my 
boy,  with  how  little  wisdom  the  world  is  governed, " 
said  Count  Oxenstiern,  the  Chancellor  of  Sweden,  to 
his  son.  Behind  the  conventional  and  magniloquent 
phrases  of  diplomatic  correspondence  I  sometimes 
think  there  is  a  void  of  intellectual  inanity  that 
imposes  upon  statesmen  themselves.  A  score  of 
adequate  illustrations  crowd  to  the  point  of  any 
unclogged  pen  in  this  connection.  But  the  most 
conspicuous  illustration  of  all  it  occurs  to  me  to  give 
at  the  moment,  because  it  will  serve  also,  by  the  way, 


94  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

as  an  all-sufficient  proof  of  the  prominence  and  per- 
vasiveness of  the  English  characteristic  of  selfishness, 
in  illustration  of  which  I  have  noted  in  the  preceding 
portion  of  these  remarks  a  more  trivial  instance,  that 
was  much  questioned  when  it  first  appeared. 

Never  has  England's  selfishness,  her  constant  prac- 
tical belief  in  the  truth  of  the  principle  of  Natural 
Selection,  and  her  confidence  that  the  working  of  this 
theory  may  he  facilitated  by  jealous  attention  to  one's 
own  resources,  — God  helping  those  who  help  them- 
selves,—  been  more  effectively  demonstrable  than  in 
the  whole  history  of  her  relations  with  her  colonies. 
She  has  believed  that  the  race  is  indeed  to  the  swift- 
est, and  the  battle  to  the  strongest,  and  bread  to  the 
worldly-wise ;  and  she  has  seen  that  the  best  way  to 
prove  this  is  to  win  by  being  universally  competent 
herself.  But  in  statecraft,  as  in  the  selling  of  eggs, 
there  may  be  a  wisdom  of  the  penny  and  the  foolish- 
ness of  the  pound.  In  this  one  conspicuous  particular 
such  fiscal  demoralisation  and  folly  have  almost  al- 
ways marked  the  policy  of  the  usually  so  honest  and 
fair-minded  England.  What  her  ministers  ought  al- 
ways to  have  done  in  regard  to  colonial  affairs,  that 
is,  in  regard  to  foreign  affairs  that  were  really  home 
affairs,  was  to  bend  all  their  energies  to  hoodwink- 
ing the  people.  She  should  have  made  her  children 
useful  to  her,  and  at  the  same  time  concealed  from 


ENGLISH  AND  "AMERICANS."  95 

them  their  subjection.  What  actually  she  has 
usually  succeeded  in  doing  is  either  to  apply  the 
chastising  rod,  or  else  to  show  in  regard  to  her  off- 
spring an  unnatural  indifference.  Hence  the  culti- 
vation of  that  spirit  of  alienation  in  the  colonies 
which  a  century  ago  wrested  from  England  the 
United  States  in  North  America,  and  which  seems 
liable  to  disintegrate  her  larger  empire  of  this  nine- 
teenth century.  Ordinarily  any  proper  working  theory 
of  diplomacy  depends  upon  a  practical  application  to 
human  nature  of  the  eternal  principal  of  the  Conserva- 
tion of  Energy ;  action,  that  is,  without  speech,  faire 
sans  dire.  But  what  shall  we  say  of  a  people  who, 
in  the  first  place,  have  from  sheer  indifference  neg- 
lected their  duty  for  so  long  a  time  that  the  policy  of 
faire  sans  dire  is  on  many  problems  now  impracti- 
cable, and  who  now  fail  to  take  the  only  course  left 
open  to  them,  that  of  a  generous  interest  and  sym- 
pathy, which  shall  uproot  all  falsity  of  pride?  By 
such  careless  indifference  to-day  England  runs  the  risk 
of  losing  a  splendid  empire.1 

The  revolution  of  the  English  colonies  in  America 
would  seem  to  have  taught  England  nothing.  The 
enormity  of  English  stupidity  in  matters  of  this  sort 
is  a  crime  against  sanity  which  will  almost  tolerate 

1  Cf .  the  whole  series  of  Burke's  studies  on  the  American 
Revolution,  especially  the  "Address  to  the  King." 


96  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

extravagant  figures  to  describe  it.  What  pathos  in 
her  frantic  endeavours  to  bite  off  her  own  nose !  She 
betrays  dangerous  symptoms  of  growing  cataract,  im- 
pairing clearness  of  vision.  Her  statesmen  need  a 
course  in  moral  geometry  and  ethical  conic  sections, 
to  learn  how  to  plot  outward,  into  regions  that  just  as 
intimately  concern  them  beyond  their  shores,  the  pro- 
jection of  certain  admirably  straight  lines  and  princi- 
ples which  they  readily  enough  apply  to  themselves 
and  to  the  people  for  whom  they  legislate  in  their 
own  island.  As  long  ago  as  the  time  of  Edward  I. 
the  decree  De  tallagio  non  concedendo  settled  that 
no  tax  or  impost  should  be  levied  without  the  joint 
consent  of  the  Lords  and  Commons.  In  England  it- 
self this  has  been  a  much-admired  principle  for  cen- 
turies, and  out  of  it  grew  the  principle  of  no  taxation 
without  representation.  But  violation  of  the  spirit 
of  this  decree  lost  to  the  mother  country  the  American 
colonies.  England  did  not  see  at  the  time,  and  she 
does  not  now  wholly  see,  that  her  sons  are  her  sons 
though  seas  divide  them.  How  fond  the  island  Eng- 
lishmen are  of  facts,  and  how  well  they  manipulate 
them,  I  have  elsewhere  stated.  "  The  English  now  and 
then  produce  a  learned  creature  like  a  thistle,  prickly 
with  all  facts,  and  incapable  of  all  fruit. "  But  appar- 
ently England  is  the  Doubting  Thomas  of  the  nations, 
who  believes  in  no  facts  but  those  which  can  literally 


ENGLISH  AND   "  AMERICANS."  97 

be  handled,  —  such,  for  instance,  as  produce  the  clan- 
nish barbaric  warfare  that  often  exists  for  generations 
between  families,  over  merely  a  disputed  ell  of  real 
estate,  —  or  else  facts  that  can  be  seen  in  closest  per- 
spective. If  this  were  not  true,  she  would  be  more 
alive  to  the  stress  of  the  present  time. 

The  North  American  Revolution  was  as  truly  a 
civil  war  as  the  War  of  Secession  in  the  United 
States  of  America  or  the  great  Cromwellian  outbreak 
of  that  name  in  England.  George  III.  thought  it 
the  revolt  of  a  dependency.  It  is  a  fallacy,  however, 
that  has  been  too  long  held  to  imagine  that  the 
American  colonies  proved  their  right  to  a  separate 
existence  by  virtue  of  their  success.  The  legitimacy 
of  the  struggle  lay  in  its  character  as  a  fight  for 
equity  of  rights.  New  Englishmen  happened  to 
have  a  temper  more  English  than  that  of  their  domi- 
neering elder  brothers  on  the  soil  of  the  old  home, 
and  they  were  more  keenly  alive  to  any  derogation 
from  their  rights.  Like  the  Plaza-Toro  family  in 
Mr.  Gilbert's  Gondoliers,  they  did  not  "  demand " 
until  they  had  first  "  sought "  and  "  desired  "  equality 
of  recognition  at  court  with  the  other  portions  of  the 
state.  When  that  freedom  and  equality  were  denied 
them  by  an  ignorant  and  indifferent  government, 
then  was  born  their  right  to  fight  to  the  bitter  end. 
But,  of  course,  the  issue  of  individual  existence,  be- 


98  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

yond  that  of  local  self-government,  was  by  no  means 
"  constitutional, "  or  anything  but  revolutionary.  As 
self-respecting  Englishmen,  their  only  course  was  a 
protracted  obstinacy.  But  the  spirit  of  final  compro- 
mise which  usually  stands  Englishmen  in  such  good 
stead  just  at  the  last  moment,  forsook  at  this  crisis 
those  who  lived  at  home,  and  the  wrongheadedness  of 
Lord  North's  government  dropped  the  insolent  iron 
hand  of  coercion  upon  a  people  very  much  more  Eng- 
lish than  the  Englishmen  who  were  then  in  the  majority 
in  Parliament.  Had  it  not  been  for  an  estranging 
sea,  too  wide  to  be  traversed  by  the  unsympathetic, 
selfish  gaze  of  England,  Englishmen  would  have  seen 
that  they  were  putting  their  feet  upon  the  necks  of 
brothers,  and  that  it  was  time  to  change  the  character 
they  were  playing  to  that  of  Sir  Giles  Fairplay,  which 
suits  them  so  much  better.  Here  was  an  object-lesson 
that  would  have  been  large  enough  for  all  but  English 
eyes.  But  it  was  not  learned  by  the  English  of 
America  any  more  than,  as  we  see  ample  proofs  to- 
day, it  has  been  learned  in  England.  As  a  civil  war, 
the  North  American  Revolution  was  inevitable;  as 
a  war  of  independence,  it  was  at  the  time  a  geogra- 
phical necessity.  The  Civil  War  in  the  United  States 
of  North  America  discussed,  with  the  argument  of  bul- 
lets, practically  the  same  question;  namely,  the  rights 
enjoyed  by  people  possessed  of  local  self-government, 


ENGLISH   AND   "  AMERICANS."  99 

and  the  duties  incumbent  upon  them,  The  right  of 
the  Southern  States  to  secession  was  certainly  much 
more  plausible  than  that  of  the  original  New  English 
colonies  to  secede;  for  the  national  integrity  de- 
pended originally  upon  a  voluntary  compact.  The 
exact  nature  of  State-rights  and  the  Union  was  far 
less  quickly  and  certainly  determinable,  and  the  in- 
dividual independence  of  the  several  States  was  really, 
as  some  of  the  Border  States  i  clearly  saw,  an  arguable 
question;  whereas  that  of  the  colonies  was  not,  until 
a  stupid  policy  drew  a  line  wider  than  the  ocean 
between  the  home  island  and  that  part  of  England 
in  America.  As  society  is  constituted,  the  error  of 
the  South  in  the  Union  of  the  North  American  States 
was  in  not  adopting  constitutional  methods,  and  in 
precipitating  the  war  before  all  other  means  had  been 
tried.  The  North  scarcely  realised  how  divergent  its 
own  political  development  and  that  of  the  slave 
States  had  rapidly  come  to  be,  Many  of  the  natural 
political  English  tendencies,  in  particular  those  mak- 
ing towards  the  democratic  principle,  were  arrested 
and  all  but  destroyed  by  atrophy  throughout  the 
entire  South  of  the  slaves,  and  the  community  became 
less  and  less  intelligible  to  the  more  consistent  members 
of  the  Puritan  or  Quaker  North  who  had  maintained 

1  Kentucky,  for  instance,  at  first,  in  its  attitude  of  neutrality, 
in  which  President  Lincoln  acquiesced. 


100  PATRIOTISM   AND   SCIENCE. 

and  cultivated  the  old  English  tradition.  Fortunately 
for  both  the  North  and  the  South  in  America,  there 
were  no  natural  barriers  of  mountain  or  dim  stretches 
of  vague  sea  to  solve  with  hopeless  disruption,  as 
with  the  irony  of  a  fate  that  puts  to  scorn  all  human 
intervention,  a  question  in  which  the  anxious  dis- 
cussions of  men  were  vain,  and  their  actual  warfare 
impotently  sublime  and  pathetic  folly.  Marriages  of 
States,  obviously,  save  on  the  shores  of  the  Adriatic, 
are  made  in  heaven ;  at  all  events  not  always  by  the 
orthodox  appointed  ministers  on  earth. 

This  entire  significant  episode  in  history  is  largely 
explained  by  the  fact  that  the  characteristic  blinding 
English  selfishness,  which  sometimes  looks  so  hopeless, 
got  the  upper  hand  of  the  English  habit  of  final  com- 
promise, which  is  almost  as  characteristic.  As  has 
been  said  before,  from  the  dominance  of  this  prin- 
ciple, which  destroyed  her  insight  and  injured  her 
sense  of  perspective,  she  has  suffered  much  chagrin. 
That  even  thus  the  whole  injury  she  does  herself  is 
not  told,  but  that  in  general  this  selfishness  even  dis- 
torts her  judgment,  I  lately  noted  entertainingly 
illustrated  by  a  mural  tablet  placed  between  two 
nondescript  Indians  in  Westminster  Abbey,  who  hold 
upon  their  heads  a  piece  of  sculpture  erected  to  the 
memory  of  an  Hon.  Lieut. -Colonel  Roger  Townshend, 
killed  by  a  cannon-ball  on  the  25th  of  July,  1759, 


ENGLISH   AND  ''AMERICANS."  101 

he  was  reconnoitring  the  French  lines  at  Ticonderoga. 
This  slab  enrolls  the  Hon.  Lieut. -Colonel  Roger 
Townshend  "  with  the  names  of  those  immortal  states- 
men and  commanders  whose  wisdom  and  intrepidity 
in  the  cause  of  this  comprehensive  and  successful  war 
have  extended  the  commerce,  enlarged  the  dominions, 
and  upheld  the  majesty  of  these  kingdoms  beyond 
the  idea  of  any  former  age. "  Oh,  shades  of  Alexander 
and  Napoleon,  what  can  one  say  more?  Really,  we 
English  do  need  an  Academy,  after  all.  For  notwith- 
standing the  internal  evidence  of  the  style,  there  is 
surely  no  reason  to  suppose  that  the  Hon.  Lieut. - 
Colonel  Roger  Townshend,  one  of  the  immortals  of 
this  war  which  upheld  the  majesty  of  this  British 
empire  beyond  the  idea  of  any  former  age,  is  a  mythi- 
cal creature  or  a  demigod.  For  Fort  Ticonderoga 
still  stands,  the  most  imposing  military  ruin  in 
America,  —  I  speak  under  correction  here,  —  and  across 
its  western  barracks  the  sun  sets  full  upon  its  brown 
and  crumbling  stone,  adorned  when  once  I  saw  it 
with  a  truly  nineteenth-  century  legend  in  the  staring 
white  letters  of  somebody's  "  Stove  Polish. "  This 
legend  attests  at  all  events  a  certain  reality  to  the 
cycle  of  stories  clustering  about  the  ruin.  But  Ticon- 
deroga is  not  only  a  monument  to  American  vulgarity. 
It  is  also  a  warning  to  Englishmen,  almost  as  significant 
as  their  painful  memories  of  Manipur,  of  the  fatality 


102  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

lurking  in  their  short-sighted  selfishness  and  in  the 
practical  lack  of  perspective  I  have  mentioned. 
They  should  see  to  it  that  amid  "  the  long  wash  of 
Australasian  seas  "  there  arise  not  another  Ticonde- 
roga  as  significant.  For  they  still  have  it  in  their 
power,  at  this  period  of  rapidly  extending  intercommu- 
nication, when  seas  no  longer  divide  as  they  once  did 
in  the  earlier  time  when  Englishmen  in  America  laid 
the  foundations  of  their  new  American  state,  to  seize 
the  event,  and,  securing  for  themselves  and  their 
posterity  a  harmonious  and  federated  empire,  to  seal 
for  some  time  the  issue  of  the  future. 

Is  it  not  a  pity  that  the  inflation  and  boastfulness 
of  which  mention  has  been  made,  arising  partly  from 
a  sense  of  their  own  deficiencies,  should  be  so  rife 
among  Englishmen  all  over  the  world,  and  especially 
among  Englishmen  in  America  ?  For  it  is  unnecessary. 
A  talent  of  appreciation  is  much  more  natural  to  the 
people  of  the  United  States  than  to  the  island  Eng- 
lish. But  criticism,  of  course,  however  much  it 
fulfils  its  function  by  being  simply  a  faithful  recording 
of  impressions  or  as  a  sympathetic  interpretation,  is 
at  least  the  ability  to  know  a  good  thing  when  one 
sees  it.  Yet  the  feeling  of  the  courage  of  one's  con- 
victions, while  always  a  moral  characteristic  in  a 
person  of  artistic  genius  or  special  abilities,  unfortu- 
nately may  exist  quite  apart  from  critical  insight  or 


ENGLISH   AND   "AMERICANS."  103 

intellectual  cleverness.  Much  of  th'e  unadulterated 
strain  of  English  "blood  in  America,  and  certain  other 
sections  of  charming  and  appreciative  people  not 
English,  still  possess  this  steadiness  and  poise  which 
I  have  elsewhere  called  moral  inertia,  and  are  quite 
free  from  the  vulgar  "  "bounce "  and  boastfulness. 
But  these  are  clearly  no  longer  the  dominant  classes 
in  American  life.  Democratic  institutions  have  tended 
to  their  disfranchisement.  The  remnant,  possessing 
a  refined  tradition  of  manners  and  of  ideas,  and  en- 
dowed hereditarily  with  the  love  of  whatsoever  things 
are  noble  and  of  good  report,  —  people  certainly  hav- 
ing in  their  composition  a  positive  basis  for  looking 
at  things  critically  as  they  are,  —  comparatively  speak- 
ing, is  very  small.  Not  unlike  the  vanishing  class  of 
the  Faubourg  St.  Germain  in  Paris,  with  which,  how- 
ever, it  has  nothing  else  in  common,  it  lives  in  as  un- 
obtrusive an  alienation  as  possible  in  the  midst  of  a 
vast  number  of  good-natured  and  commonplace  vul- 
garians who  are  the  heirs  of  the  future.  Its  function 
is  the  tending  of  the  vestal  fires.  It  is  a  dethroned 
aristocracy,  beyond  any  question  more  exclusive  than 
the  aristocracy  of  England.  Levites  of  the  arcana 
of  the  best  in  American  life,  their  own  self-preserva- 
tion almost  demands  their  isolation.  Their  condition 
is  pathetic,  were  it  not  so  enviable,  in  the  distinction 
attaching  to  their  sacred  obligation  of  preserving  the 


104  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

national  records  and  keeping  the  fires  alight.  At 
times  they  half  believe  they  prefer  the  "  stinking 
breath  "  and  the  "  sweaty  nightcap  "  of  the  rampant 
democracy  fast  developing  in  England,  to  the  exas- 
perating habit  of  gaucherie  manifested  in  every 
gesture  by  people  given  only  to  pennies,  psalms,  or 
platitudes.  For  though  the  gap  between  the  higher 
and  the  lower  in  England  is  yearly  narrowing,  still 
there  is  a  pleasant  deference  and  that  habit  of  respect 
which  leads  to  ease  of  living  there.  In  the  States  of 
North  America  and,  I  am  told,  in  the  English  colonies 
as  well,  the  presumptuous  familiarity  of  manner,  born 
usually  of  the  very  kindest  and  most  unselfish  feelings, 
is  extremely  irritating,  and  none  the  less  so  for  the 
merit  of  its  origin.  American  bonhomie  seems  to  be 
an  endeavour  to  be  one  thing  to  all  men.  This  is  not 
at  all  the  same  thing  as  being  all  things  to  all  men. 
The  Pauline  diplomacy  is  an  ideal  that  neither  Eng- 
land nor  America  has  reached.  The  self-centred  in- 
difference of  island  Englishmen  is  as  unfavourable  to 
this  ideal  as  the  hearty  abandon  of  indiscriminate 
intimacy  that  marks  the  American  type  of  English- 
man. The  Christian  conception  of  the  fellowship  of 
mankind  and  love  of  one's  neighbour  has  become  far 
riper  in  America  than  in  England,  and  it  is  usually 
more  genuine  when  it  exists.  But  there  is  very  little 
of  the  early  spirit  of  this  much-prized  Christianity  in 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  105 

either  country.  By  both  countries  Jesus  is  the  most 
discussed,  but  the  least  understood,  person  in  history. 
In  the  United  States  people  are  .  often  wooed  tfc 
churches  where  they  are  told  nine  times  what  Paulv 
said  to  once  what  Jesus  said,  and  their  attendance  is 
won  by  theatrical  devices  which  in  England  are 
thought  very  bad  taste  indeed.  But  listeners  once 
won  are  undoubtedly  for  the  most  part  more  intel- 
lectually entertained  and  rationally  stirred  by  the  ser- 
mon than  church-goers  in  England.  Except  in  the 
Episcopal  Church,  so  called,  which  is  in  America 
only  a  sect  among  others  more  significant,  the  same 
interest  does  not  attach  to  the  rest  of  the  service  other 
than  the  sermon.  But  the  average  ability  of  New 
English  or  even  all  the  North  American  clergy  is  in 
advance  of  the  average  ability  of  the  same  class  in 
England.  In  comparison  with  the  stern,  highly  elab- 
orated tutelage  of  the  New  English  clergy,  the  train- 
ing and  circumstances  of  the  clergy  in  England  under 
the  Establishment  have  been  lax  and  demoralising. 
The  result  has  been  in  New  England  a  stronger  moral 
fibre,  but  a  learning  adapted  to  less  humane  ends,  and 
in  general  a  deeper  but  less  broad  intellectual  achieve- 
ment. "  The  religion  most  prevalent  in  our  northern 
colonies,"  said  Burke,  in  his  speech  on  Conciliation 
with  America,  "  is  a  refinement  on  the  principle  of 
resistance;  it  is  the  dissidence  of  dissent,  and  the 


106  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

protestantism  of  the  Protestant  religion."  The  elet 
ment  of  life  transplanted  in  the  first  two  centuries 
beyond  the  Atlantic  was  an  invigorating  principle 
from  the  marrow  of  the  English  backbone.  This  pro- 
testantism of  the  Protestant  religion  gave  integrity 
and  vitality  of  latent  energy  which  assured  continuous 
and,  on  the  whole,  healthy  development  to  a  people 
caring  less  for  artistic  grace  than  the  grace  of  God. 
It  was  a  Puritanism  radically  the  same  that  was 
accountable  for  the  historical  life  of  the  Israelites 
and  of  early  Rome.  Concerted  action  and  a  unani- 
mous and  patriotic  pride  in  their  own  national  life, 
based  on  sublimity  of  conceit  in  their  own  special  god, 
have  characterized  all  great  peoples  before  the  urbanity 
of  their  decadence.  But  the  special  English  strength 
of  the  early  New  Englishman  has  largely  disappeared. 
Yet  in  the  advance  towards  disillusionment,  to  which 
every  people  tends,  the  North  Americans,  placed,  geo- 
graphically speaking,  eccentrically  off  the  focal  centre 
of  European  influence,  have  got  only  to  the  precipitous 
edge  of  the  gulf  of  despair ;  but  that  they  are  even  in 
its  neighbourhood  they  are  utterly  unconscious.  What 
facts  and  elements  may  come  to  retard  this  result,  nay, 
what  already  exist,  I  am  not  for  the  moment  concerned 
to  consider ;  but  there  they  are  now  at  least,  for  better 
or  worse.  The  modern  New  Englishmen  and  the 
Englishmen  of  the  Western  States  keep  the  intellectual 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  107 

expression  of  their  ancestors'  faith,  and  of  most  of  their 
points  of  view,  but  they  are  not  inspired  with  the  old 
indomitable  confidence  in  a  vital  reality  behind  the 
expressions.  England  has  undergone  and  is  now  under- 
going a  disillusionment  as  revolutionary  as  that  of 
France,  but,  as  its  habit  is,  it  takes  the  change  more 
decorously.  An  Englishman  never  tells  all  he  knows, 
and  much  less  frequently  all  he  feels.  But  his  sanity 
and  reticence  in  matters  of  religion  should  not  be  al- 
lowed to  hide  the  fact  of  this  tremendous  and  pervasive 
subterranean  change.  The  cloak  of  his  hypocrisy  may 
in  time  not  far  distant  cover  America.  But  there  it 
can  never  so  effectually  hide  the  gestures  underneath 
as  in  England.  Perhaps  it  is  because  the  mantle  is 
so  ample  and  always  has  been  ample,  thus  affording 
opportunities  of  quieter  consideration  of  what  will  be 
the  best  way,  when  changes  threaten,  to  adapt  oneself 
to  the  new  order  of  the  time,  that  England's  history 
has  been  so  continuously  expansive  along  the  line  of 
liberty,  and  that  only  in  rare  instances  have  events 
come  to  birth  prematurely,  or  found  the  larger  part  of 
the  state  unprepared  for  them.  Of  this  truth  the  first 
two  centuries  of  New  English  history  —  almost  the 
most  characteristic,  as  I  have  elsewhere  said,  in  Eng- 
lish history  —  offer  conspicuous  proof.  But  neither 
the  New  England  of  to-day,  nor  any  body  of  men  in 
America,  can  be  cited  to  this  end.  New  England  has 


108  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

almost  outlived  the  name.  Its  boundaries  are  now 
holding  many  another  race.  As  democracy  advances 
in  England,  and  other  nations  more  and  more  rub 
shoulders  against  the  Englishman  on  the  sacred  soil 
of  the  paradise  of  his  own  patrimony,  Englishmen  will 
gradually  take  the  American  hue.  Still  insular,  how 
fast  is  the  Englishman  becoming  cosmopolitan  and 
democratic;  and  how  odd  that  he  should  not  realize 
that  his  way  has  before  been  trodden  by  the  New 
Englishman. 

The  form  which  England's  worldly  wisdom  has 
taken  is  a  perfectly  natural  result  of  her  geographical 
position.  Eor  some  centuries  she  has  sat  in  the  seat 
of  customs.  Stormed  by  the  battering  of  these  north- 
ern seas,  England's  rock  has  risen  in  the  very  high- 
way of  the  waves  of  largest  international  influence. 
Her  reticence,  her  selfishness,  were  needed  for  her 
self-preservation.  Everything,  she  knew,  would  come 
to  her  in  time.  Hence  her  dignity  and  patience  in 
the  best  type  of  her  sons,  and  in  her  worst  the  narrow 
horizon  of  her  mind,  her  brutal  self-sufficiency  and 
coarse,  pugnacious  energy,  born  of  an  ignorance  always 
eager  to  die  in  order  to  save  its  prejudices.  No 
brutality,  no  coarseness,  is  so  odious  as  English 
coarseness.  Little  of  this  was  transplanted  to  Amer- 
ica, however,  to  the  home  now  of  mediocrity  and  the 
common.  Always  through  the  centuries  the  best  type 


ENGLISH   AND   "AMERICANS."  109 

of  Englishman,  both  in  England  and  New  England, 
has  had  in  quite  unaccountable  haphazard  fashion 
visions  of  the  flammantia  mcenia  mundi.  The  calm, 
slow,  conservative  Englishman,  given  to  sleeping  in 
Authority  and  dreaming  of  the  past,  is  not  the  only, 
though  he  is  the  average  and  the  passing,  type.  There 
have  always  been  a  saving  few  given  to  the  cultivation 
of  variations  from  the  original  stock,  and  the  courage- 
ous pursuit  of  deviating  and  eccentric  humours.  In 
the  open  play  of  discussion  which  has  been  possible  in 
England,  how  often  have  flashes  of  seminal  and  il- 
luminating thought  been  struck  out  in  the  interests 
of  Truth,  and  how  rarely  elsewhere  has  the  light 
been  brighter!  But  the  flaming  boundaries  of  the 
worlds  have  scarcely  been  kenned  more  resolutely  in 
this  island  than  by  single-eyed  observers  on  New 
English  hilltops,  through  many  a  calm  long  night  of 
the  first  two  centuries  of  their  history.  All  this  is 
a  fact  unknown  in  the  insular  mother  island.  Now 
things  are  not  quite  the  same.  Englishmen,  educated 

1  wisely  for  generations  in  liberty  and  self-reliance,  and 
amidst  that  collection  of  rights  called  free  institutions, 

-  were  able  in  America  to  work  out  their  own  salvation 
without  even  the  amount  of  fear  and  trembling  that 
is  prescribed  and  that  one  might  have  thought  neces- 
sary. Suddenly,  however,  representatives  of  races 
without  the  habits  of  self-reliance,  and  unpractised 


110  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

in  the  technique  of  practical  government,  invade  the 
country,  and  the  first  scientific  result  is  a  swamping 
tidal-wave. 

It  is  a  commonplace  to  say  that  it  makes  a  vast 
difference  whether  democracy  grows  up  naturally  from 
within,  or  is  imported  from  without  as  an  idea  to  be 
engrafted.  But  the  commonplaces  are  so  often  fois; 
gotten.  It  makes  a  large  part  of  the  difference,  indeed, 
between  France  and  England,  between  England  and 
the  modem  United  States,  between  the  first  two  cen. 
turies  of  American  national  life  and  the  last  half 
century  of  that  life.  America  of  the  last  thirty  or 
forty  years  bears  scarcely  any  resemblance  to  the; 
original  English  New  England.  She  has  taken  a 
step  from  which  now  there  is  no  going  back.  She  is 
selling  her  original  birthright  for  a  conglomerate  mess 
of  pottage,  hi  which  "  Irish  stew, "  mulligatawny  soup, 
corn-bread,  "  sauer-kraut, "  and  "  lager  beer  "  are  staple 
ingredients.  The  modern  America  of  the  States  is 
entering  upon  certain  social  problems  absolutely  new: 
to  it.  These  problems  must  be  settled  by  methods 
for  which  she  will  not  be  able  to  find  any  precedent 
in  her  English  traditions.  For  her  earlier  history, 
indeed  almost  for  the  first  two  centuries  of  her  history, 
the  phenomena  with  which  she  had  to  deal  were  dis- 
tinct, definite,  what  the  scientists  call  isolated,  and 
therefore  comparatively  simple.  The  complicated 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  Ill 

tangle  of  those  that  now  exist  is  so  very  perplexing 
that  she  may  well  tremble  at  the  problem  of  unravel- 
ling them.  At  the  start  she  was  forced,  for  her  very 
life,  to  eject  elements  of  hostility  which  threatened  her 
existence.  Among  such  the  Quakers  have  a  plain 
tale  of  intolerance  manifested  towards  them,  for  in- 
stance, to  cite  in  proof.  But  for  the  most  part  during 
this  period  in  America  nothing  impeded  her  growth; 
and  with  such  blood  in  her  veins,  no  wonder  she  suc- 
ceeded. Liberty,  planted  in  a  soil  that  was  unchoked 
by  any  weeds  of  an  older  time  —  the  feudal  growth 
that  in  England  was  so  deep-rooted  —  grew  to  quick 
maturity.  But  just  for  this  reason  the  establishment 
of  national  unity  and  republican  government  was  not 
quite  so  remarkable  an  achievement  at  the  time  as 
to-day  they  seem.  The  difficulties  of  Frenchmen  in 
the  solution  of  their  problem,  which  only  to  a  super- 
ficial view  can  possibly  appear  the  same  as  the 
American,  and  was  and  is  in  reality  radically  differ- 
ent, are  worth  noting  in  comparison.  Two  genera- 
tions passed  between  the  protective  and  feudal  age  of 
Louis  XIV.  and  the  astounding  Revolution,  and 
meanwhile  almost  every  eminent  Frenchman,  formerly 
having  thought  England  barbarian,  came  to  this  island 
of  liberty  of  thought.  Voltaire  introduced  to  France 
Locke,  Newton,  and  Shakespeare.  "  Until  Voltaire 
had  got  to  know  England  by  his  travels  and  friend- 


i 


112  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

ship,"  says  Cousin,  "he  was  not  Voltaire."  The 
effect  of  these  leaders  of  light  was  that  of  an  awaken- 
ing spark.  We  know  the  story ;  but  in  the  flame  and 
the  fire  many  traditions  were  untouched  and  many 
affections  went  un  scorched.  They  had  only  disap- 
peared for  a  time  from  view  in  the  smoke  of  the  con- 
flagration. In  some  the  love  of  the  old  regime,  and 
in  others  the  force  of  a  cowering  habit,  were  here  and 
there  asbestos  in  the  fire.  "  I  'd  rather  be  a  Stuart 
bastard  than  a  legitimate  Guelph, "  a  friend  once  said 
to  me.  It  was  a  kind  of  sentiment  like  this  that  per- 
vaded France  and  still  is  not  unknown  there.  More- 
over, a  people  is  always  impressed  by  mystery,  and 
cares  for  what  it  does  not  or  cannot  possess,  as  well  as 
to  recall  what  the  fathers  enjoyed  in  "  the  good  old 
times."  And  it  is  against  this  host  of  prejudices, 
affections,  predispositions,  that  liberty  has  had  to  make 
its  way  in  France.  A  people  denied  the  experience 
of  self-government  is  almost  sure  to  go  mad  if  inflamed 
with  an  abstract  idea  of  liberty,  equality,  fraternity, 
for  which  it  is  not  ripe.  Constitutional  government 
in  England  has  been  self-government  in  leading-strings. 
The  early  colonists  in  America  were  largely  Eng- 
lishmen, with  all  the  English  training,  who  believed 
that  under  favourable  conditions  the  leading-strings 
could  be  snapped.  They  were  perfectly  right.  But 
they  who  have  builded  the  house  no  longer  sit  at  the 


ENGLISH  AND   "AMERICANS."  113 

head  of  the  table,  and  all  about  the  board  is  a  motley 
throng.  What  is  to  be  the  nature  of  the  remaining 
courses  of  the  banquet  or  the  quality  of  the  after-din- 
ner wine  and  speeches,  he  must  be  either  a  clever 
schoolboy  or  a  wise  prophet  to  suggest.1 

1  Perhaps  the  deadlock  of  business  recently  in  the  American 
House  of  Representatives,  nominally  over  the  question  of  a 
quorum,  may  indicate  to  some  extent  the  lines  along  which 
data  may  be  collected  for  the  prophetic  generalisation.  The 
episode  was  not  a  pleasant  one.  It  tested  nothing,  but  it  re- 
vealed weaknesses.  It  showed,  among  other  things,  how  bitter 
still  is  sectional  prejudice,  and  how  keen  still  the  sense  of  so- 
vereignty among  the  Southern  States.  Moreover,  it  illustrated 
on  a  large  scale  an  important  point  that  Mr.  Bagehot  was 
always  making,  —  the  greater  working  efficiency  of  the  parlia- 
mentary form  of  government  over  the  presidential  in  its  union 
of  the  executive  and  legislative  functions.  Is  it  to  be  hoped 
that  this  American  episode  is  the  rapid  retrogression  that  it 
seems  away  from  the  idea  of  centralisation  of  power,  and  the 
delegation  of  authority  to  the  lower  House  ?  A  crisis  such  as 
this,  however,  if  overcome  quietly  and  calmly  settled,  must  tend 
to  the  establishment  of  government  on  a  more  solid  basis. 
The  English  cabinet,  which  is  simply  a  governing  committee 
of  presumably  the  most  wisely  chosen  representatives  of  the 
dominant  party,  has  made  the  actual  business  of  government 
and  the  legislative  will  of  the  party  in  power  almost  identical. 
This  is  an  ideal  yet  to  be  attained  in  the  less  simple  system  of 
the  government  of  the  United  States.  Whether  this  is  a  de- 
sirable ideal,  however,  is  an  important  and  interesting  matter 
for  discussion.  No  one  has  written  more  ably  upon  this  subject 
than  Mr.  A.  Lawrence  Lowell,  in  his  "  Essays  on  Government/' 
Boston,  1889. 


114  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

But  it  is  unfortunate,  I  admit,  to  be  reminded  again, 
and  just  at  this  moment,  of  the  remark  of  Count 
Oxenstiern,  "  You  have  no  idea,  my  boy,  with  how 
little  wisdom  the  world  is  governed. " 

MAT,  1890. 


DEMOCRACY,   WITH   REFERENCE  TO  A 
RECENT  BOOK. 


DEMOCKACY,  WITH  REFERENCE  TO  A 
RECENT  BOOK. 

WHAT  is  the  greatest  name  in  the  world?  What 
word  responds  to  the  most  inclusive  thought  of  the 
time1? 

Surely  it  is  this :  Democracy.  The  word  "  Catholi- 
cism "  has  a  renowned  echo  in  the  world.  No  observer 
of  the  moment  will  refuse  to  Pope  Leo  XIII.  the 
distinction  that  is  his.  The  Holy  See  is  still  perhaps 
as  well  able  to  take  care  of  itself  as  ever.  Once  all 
eyes  turned  to  Rome  with  superstitious  adoration;  for 
centuries  the  Pope  nearly  hypnotised  the  world.  To- 
day in  Catholicism  there  is  not  quite  the  same  power 
of  attraction,  the  same  glory,  the  same  prestige.  But 
the  Catholic  Church,  —  the  Church  which  is  after  all, 
historically,  The  Church, — driven  for  mere  self-preser- 
vation to  a  new  opportunism,  a  fresh  political  wisdom, 
is  recovering  again,  for  a  time  at  least,  its  ground. 
It  is  bending  on  its  oars  with  an  unexpected  vigour. 
So  men  pull  with  a  winning  —  or  a  losing !  — stake  in 
sight.  And  although  one  sees  in  the  near  future  — 
perhaps  a  future  so  near  as  the  end  of  the  twentieth 
century  —  the  rock  of  St.  Peter,  cracked,  though  not 


118  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

shattered,  yet  more  venerable  always  and  picturesque 
than  any  of  the  foundations  on  which  the  post-Reforma- 
tion religious  sects  have  raised  the  symbols  and  temples 
of  their  faith,  while  in  the  unsightly  clefts  the  lichens 
begin  to  encroach,  as  long  ago  they  did  on  the  Doric 
flutings  of  dead  Apollo's  shrine  at  Bassae,  stillf  to-day 
there  is  no  obvious  sign  of  the  change,  to-day,  at  least, 
the  Church  is  holding  its  own  —  and  more ! 

Why  is  this  renewed  vitality,  this  undiminished 
and  lusty  life  1  Because,  simply  because,  it  has  burned 
the  old  standards,  and  raised  another  of  a  bunting 
woven  in  nineteenth-century  looms.  It  has  lifted  the 
standard  of  Democracy.  Pope  Leo  XIII.  has  himself 
given  the  cue  in  memorable  words.1  It  is  not  seemly 
—  the  application  was  to  France  and  the  Royalists  — 
that  the  Church  should  direct  its  loyalty  to  more  than 
one  corpse. 

The  fittest  survives  on  this  planet.  But  the  fittest 
survives  only  in  obedience  to  the  laws  of  this  planet, 
of  this  whole  mysterious  system  in  the  network  of  the 
complications  of  which  we  find  ourselves  prisoners 
with  the  sweet  illusion  that  we  are  free.  To  ignore 
the  arrangement  of  things  is  the  courageous  privilege 
of  an  idealist,  of  a  Ravachol,  but  not  of  a  discreet, 

1  The  exact  words  of  Leo  XIII.  as  spoken  to  Monsieur  do 
Blowitz  were :  L'figlise  du  Christ  ne  s'attache  qu'a  un  seul  ca- 
davre,  a  celui  qui  est  lui-meme  attache  sur  la  croix. 


DEMOCRACY.  119 

time-serving  man,  not  of  the  opportunist.  And  The 
Church,  in  its  alliance  with  Democracy,  is  showing 
itself  more  in  and  of  the  world  than  ever.  So,  that 
it  will  survive  yet  for  a  fruitful  while  one  may  be 
sure:  it  has  based  its  hope  upon  the  greatest  of  all 
names ;  it  is  making  the  cause  of  the  people  its  own. 

Yes,  Democracy  is  the  greatest  name  in  the  world; 
and  the  entertainment  which  the  advance  of  the  ideas 
for  which  it  stands  offers  to  the  critic  is  so  exhilarat- 
ing as  almost  to  imperil  his  steadiness  of  vision.  To 
be  fully  abreast  of  one's  time,  —  an  achievement  which 
Goethe  thought  enough  to  make  a  man  a  genius,  — is 
to-day  beyond  the  opportunity  of  even  so  fortunately 
placed  an  observer  as  a  pope.  Not  even  can  Leo 
XIII.,  who,  for  the  pleasure  of  criticism,  is  the  most 
privileged  prisoner  on  the  planet,  hope  to  sum  up  the 
entire  moment;  not  even  he  can  venture  to  plot  the 
curve  of  the  developing  Democracy.  But  the  great 
thing  is  that  he  has  seen  the  nature  of  the  problem, 
and  where  lies  the  safety  of  the  venerable  interests 
dear  to  him.  Could  there  be  any  doubt,  indeed,  that 
the  word  "  Democracy  "  covers  vaguely  a  host  of  facts 
belonging  to  the  most  interesting  series  now  at  the 
critical  disposal  of  an  observing  man,  the  right-about- 
face  of  Catholicism  just  the  other  day  in  Prance  would 
be  conclusive  evidence :  so  much  confidence  has  The 
Church  taught  us  to  have  in  her  worldly  wisdom! 


120  PATRIOTISM   AND  SCIENCE. 

It  is  of  the  latest  serious  attempt  to  interpret  to  us 
the  meaning  of  this  word  so  often  on  our  lips  to-day, 
Laveleye's  Le  Gouvernement  dans  la  Democratic,1 
that  I  am  now  going  to  speak.  We  have  not  the  book 
as  yet  in  English.  But  in  Europe,  as  of  all  that 
Laveleye  did,  one  hears  about  it  a  great  deal.  Per- 
haps readers  care  about  him  there  too  much.  But  it 
is  worth  while,  I  believe,  as  often  as  possible  to  inter- 
est ourselves  in  what  other  people  are  saying  on  those 
matters  of  which  we  too  are  thinking.  The  process  is 
invigorating  and  widening;  it  is  a  good  thing  for  our 
prejudices. 

A  new  book  by  Laveleye  was  always  a  pleasure,  but 
never  a  surprise.  Few  writers  devoting  themselves 
to  large,  yet  after  all  special  and  limited,  themes  have 
adopted  at  once  so  many  of  the  good,  and  some  of  the  at- 
tractive but  unfortunate,  intellectual  methods  of  our  age. 
There  have  been  times,  one  likes  to  think,  when  men 
have  had  no  thought  for  the  morrow ;  when  they  have 
cared  only  to  satisfy  their  own  sense  of  perfection,  let- 
ting all  other  ends  take  care  of  themselves;  when  they 
have  been  willing  to  risk  being  forestalled,  so  only 
they  might  be  left  sincerely  to  follow  their  own  bent 
in  their  own  leisurely  way.  At  our  exciting  moment  of 
to-day  the  temptation  to  be  immediately  heard  leads  so 

1  Le  Gouvernement  dans  la  Democratic,  par  £mile  de  Lave- 
leye.    Vols.  2.     Paris:  Felix  Alcan,  1891.     pp.  664. 


DEMOCRACY.  121 

many  of  us,  on  the  contrary,  into  the  strenuous  com- 
pany of  those  who  speak  long  and  overloudly,  "because 
it  seems  a  kind  of  duty  to  anticipate  our  neighbours. 
And  Laveleye  often  yielded  to  this  temptation;  he 
rarely  failed  to  let  us  all  feel  that  he  did  not  intend  to 
be  left  out  in  the  cold.  His  work,  naturally,  suffered 
from  these  conditions;  it  almost  always  showed  signs 
of  impatience.  His  thousands  of  pages  were  often  put 
forth  unedited,  so  often  even  unindexed,  when  the 
index  would  have  given  really  so  very  little  trouble. 
Yet  certainly  it  is  at  the  loss  of  a  number  of  very 
superior  merits  in  our  work  that  we  make  up  our 
minds  to  be  in  a  hurry.  Moreover,  if  a  writer  is  con- 
vinced that  at  any  cost  he  must  be  encyclopaedic,  lest 
somebody  should  catch  him  napping,  is  it  not  the 
choosing  of  some  inferior  pleasures  for  others  that  are 
really  higher  ?  How  can  the  fact  of  the  possession  of 
a  large  horizon  in  intellectual  matters  ever,  of  itself, 
make  up  for  constantly  obtruding  evidences  of  a  cer- 
tain indifference  to  the  presence  of  spaces  of  untilled 
ground  here  and  there  within  its  magnificent  sweep  1 
Yet,  although  Laveleye's  work  is  lacking  in  unity, 
in  force,  in  convincingness,  it  can  never  fail  to  be 
delightfully  suggestive  for  readers  open-eyed;  for, 
as  I  said,  he  reflects  most  of  the  good,  and  some 
of  the  bad,  of  this  particular  moment.  Suggestive, 
delightfully  suggestive,  the  moment  is,  but  its  great- 


122  PATRIOTISM   AND   SCIENCE. 

est  admirers  will  scarcely  deny  that  it  is  wanting  in 
unity  and  in  force.  Of  all  this,  Laveleye's  last  book 
must  henceforward  bring  continuous  pathetic  proof. 
And  yet  to  love  to  generalise,  to  possess,  as  a  part  of 
one's  temperament,  that  kind  of  gift  of  imagination 
that  makes  generalisation  possible  and  a  pleasure,  and 
to  subordinate  facts  to  this  gift,  this  habit,  while  still 
liking  them  in  themselves,  is  not  common;  and  it  is 
common,  least  of  all,  in  the  English  temper.  So  that 
this  suggestiveness  of  Laveleye  is  in  itself,  at  this 
time,  really  a  distinguished  merit,  and  of  value  for 
English  writers  for  instruction.  And  while  his  worl 
has  so  much  of  so  distinguished  a  quality,  if  it  had  not 
also  the  unworthy  impatience  it  would  appeal  to 
as  more  compact,  more  philosophical,  more  enduring. 
It  was  this  impatience  that  allowed  him  to  be  self -con- 
tradictory with  surprising  frequency;  because  of  tl 
he  often  raised  foot-notes  to  the  dignity  of  chapters: 
because  of  this,  too,  he  went  on  repeating  himself, 
and  too  often  only  compiling  without  sorting,  just 
the  farmer  of  the  New  Testament  parable  garnei 
crops  of  excellent  grain  merely  for  storage  into  bai 
Yet  criticism  such  as  this  undoubtedly  has  a  slightly 
troubled  conscience ;  for  Laveleye  had  read  so  mu( 
and  really  had  knowledge  of  so  many  things,  and  aftei 
all  did  in  some,  indeed  in  many,  respects  his  owi 
particular  task  so  surprisingly  well, — when  one  thinl 


DEMOCRACY.  123 

of  the  complexity  of  the  subjects,  —  and  he  was 
usually  so  helpful,  letting  his  thought  play  freely  and 
very  widely,  that  it  would  he  a  pity  not  to  say  enough 
positively  in  praise  to  keep  all  the  lines  of  perspective 
true.  But  criticism,  surely,  must  always  hold  up  the 
ideal  perfection ;  and  to  secure  an  audience,  moreover, 
Laveleye's  work  does  not  need  any  man's  approval. 
It  is  already  popularly  thought  to  be  too  important  a 
fact.  He  long  ago  secured  his  large  and  judicious 
circle  of  readers,  who  will  still  listen  to  him  in  any 
circumstances,  whatever  any  one  of  us  may  say, 
whether  in  censure  or  in  praise. 

Laveleye's  too  impressive  lack  of  method,  however, 
and  his  very  modern  lack  of  force  and  unity  have  not 
detracted  from  the  fine  superior  characteristic  in  him 
of  suggestiveness,  and  therefore  from  what  might  be 
called,  in  so  difficult  a  theme  as  was  his  latest,  the 
almost  stirring  interest  of  his  book  on  Democracy. 
When  it  is  admitted  once  and  for  all  that  a  book  like 
this  would  have  been  in  many  respects  an  ideal  in  its 
kind  for  the  official  head  of  the  old  Alexandrian 
Library,  certainly  the  author's  dearest  friends  cannot 
expect  of  the  class  of  his  more  detached  readers  keener 
appreciation  of  his  value.  These  other  merits  —  indi- 
viduality, originality,  force  —  are  not  necessary  merits 
of  encyclopaedic  works,  and  why  should  they  be  looked 
for  ?  If  Laveleye  were  ever  dull,  he  really  might  be 


124  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

called  the  Pausanias  of  constitutional  achievements. 
As  he  is,  he  is  very  entertaining  and  usually  luminous, 
with  a  great  talent  for  appreciating  sanely  things  that 
exist,  and  he  always  seems  surprisingly  complete,  im- 
partial. Perhaps  we  should  be  greedy  to  demand 
more ;  to  ask,  for  instance,  for  the  clairvoyant  things 
that  please  us  in  De  Tocqueville,  or  the  clear  method, 
the  science,  or  the  really  critical  sense  of  a  Bagehot. 

So  this  last  work  of  Laveleye  will  always  be  a  use- 
ful book.  He  set  himself  there  to  say  all  that  was 
to  be  said  on  what  is  undoubtedly  the  timeliest  of 
themes,  and  a  writer  wedded  as  he  was  to  history 
could  scarcely  have  said  more  than  he  said.  To  facts 
he  clung  very  nearly  always.  He  was  aware  of  ap- 
proximately all  that  has  been  written  wisely  on  these 
interesting  matters.  He  was  quite  wonderfully  up  to 
date.  In  Prance,  save  M.  Boutmy,  who  is  there  that 
has  kept  careful  pace  with  all  the  political  facts  of  the 
time?  In  England,  before  Bagehot,  who  was  there 
that  knew  at  once  really  accurately  and  comprehen- 
sively much  about  the  immense  cluster  of  political 
facts  in  the  United  States  of  North  America,  for  in- 
stance, in  their  unexplored  suggestiveness  for  students 
of  Democracy  1  Then  came  Mr.  Bryce  and  compiled 
his  thesaurus,  his  encyclopaedia,  revealing  to  a  host  of 
inattentive  scientists  the  absorbing  significance  of  this 
class  of  American  facts.  But  of  this  undiscovered 


DEMOCRACY.  125 

country,  so  valuable  for  research,  —  from  which,  how- 
ever, sooner  or  later  all  travellers  return,  —  Laveleye 
knew  more,  apparently,  than  any  other  European. 
He  did  not,  I  think,  know  enough,  nor  did  he  know 
much  more  than  the  rest  of  us  do  about  Australia. 
But  in  all  other  countries  he  appreciated  the  demo- 
cratic movement  from  the  point  of  view  of  history  as 
no  one  had  done  hitherto.  Yet  the  breaks  in  his 
vision  were  serious,  and  they  limit  the  value  of  his 
last  book  too  definitely  in  essential  things  to  pass  un- 
noticed. He  is  very  discreet,  not  daring  to  prophesy 
what  will  happen  some  day  and  soon.  Yet  more  ven- 
turesome attempts  to  form  a  "  political  science  "  would 
have  been  tolerable.  For,  structural  conditions  —  con- 
ditions, I  mean,  of  this  very  moment  —  he  exactly 
defines.  But  there  is  a  whole  rather  interminable 
network  of  significant  psychologic  facts,  spiritual  facts, 
mechanical  facts,  even  now  existing,  although  new  with 
our  age,  which  have  begun  to  modify  all  the  conclusions 
to  be  drawn  from  the  somewhat  stale  teachings  of  his- 
tory of  which  students  have  always  been  so  fond,  and 
which,  if  carefully  disentangled  and  scanned,  would  give 
such  students  a  positive  enthusiasm  for  scientific  pro- 
phecy,—  a  prophecy  in  which,  without  cynicism,  we 
should  be  willing  enough  to  watch  them  indulge.  Yet 
upon  none  of  these  did  Laveleye  insist,  and  few  of  them 
has  he  recorded.  This  class  of  facts,  everywhere  visible 


126  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

to-day,  is,  it  is  true,  everywhere  save  in  the  Americas, 
in  South  Africa,  and  in  Australia,  rather  intangible, 
indeed  all  but  hopelessly  complicated,  so  that  it  is  not 
easily  determinable.  But  in  Australia  and  at  the 
Cape  and  in  the  United  States  of  North  America,  for 
instance,  many  of  them,  after  all,  are  so  clear  and 
obvious  that  they  may  be  said  almost  to  advertise 
themselves,  so  that  even  he  who  runs  may  read;  and 
it  is  just  these  facts  which  at  our  time  a  writer  on 
"  Democracy  "  ought  to  try  to  press  into  his  service 
and  to  question.  Even  at  the  risk  of  being  thought 
unscientific,  Utopian,  there  was  here  an  enviable  op- 
portunity, to  be  had  only  for  the  searching.  Hence- 
forth few  of  the  deductions  of  history  will  much  help 
us  in  plotting  the  curves  of  the  developing  Democracy. 
Such  deductions  will  still  for  some  time  have  a  great 
bearing  on  the  problem  as  it  may  be  studied  in  Eng- 
land, and  on  the  continent  of  Europe  a  closer  bearing 
still;  but  in  comparison  none  whatever,  I  repeat, 
though  with  some  exaggeration,  in  the  United  States 
of  North  America,  for  there  is  the  entire  overwhelm- 
ing series  of  new  facts  and  new  conditions  which  are 
positively  modifying  the  individual  man.  To  say  that 
this  train  of  thought  was  unknown  to  Laveleye  would 
be  untrue.  He  gave  many  intimations  that  he  was 
partially  aware  of  this  change  which  is  so  radical :  this 
was  shown  in  his  way  of  talking  about  the  South 


DEMOCRACY.  127 

American  States  in  comparison  with  the  spirit  of  the 
things  he  said  about  the  great  Republic  in  North 
America ;  but  these  remarks  were,  after  all,  only  inti- 
mations, and  perhaps  he  magnanimously,  rather  sadly 
withal,  rejected  his  chance,  preferring  always  to  be 
strictly  historical.  However  this  may  be,  he  neglected 
an  opportunity,  and  his  main  deductions,  his  most 
original  suggestions,  were  usually  in  regard  to  the 
modern  France,  which  is,  of  course,  after  the  two 
great  countries  already  named,  the  chief  centre  of 
amusement  just  now  to  students  of  political  science, 
and  a  country  which  undoubtedly,  it  may  be  said,  he 
knew  much  better  than  others  more  remote. 

About  modern  France,  indeed,  how  excellent  in  this 
last  book  he  often  is !  Take  this  which  is  so  much  at 
one  with  all  he  has  to  say  about  the  value  of  Puritan- 
ism in  England,  — and  Laveleye  loved  Puritanism, — 
about  that  Puritanism  which  has  been  the  great  leaven 
of  independency  in  religion :  — 

"  If  France  had  not  persecuted,  massacred,  and  exiled 
those  of  her  children  who  became  converts  to  Protestantism, 
she  would  have  developed  those  germs  of  liberty  and  of 
self-government  which  had  been  preserved  in  the  provincial 

States." 

This  is  not  a  new  idea, —  although  would  it  were 
even  older,  and  better  known, — but  Laveleye  was 
always  putting  this  idea  opposite  a  new  light  and 


128  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

insisting  upon  it;  and  to  us  Englishmen,  or  New  Eng- 
lishmen, who  are  so  apt  to  suppose  that  it  is  among  us, 
alone  of  modern  peoples,  that  the  germs  of  liberty 
have  existed,  on  account  of  some  radical  superiority 
which  in  a  way  gives  us  a  kind  of  divine  right  to  domi- 
nation, it  is  a  real  service  to  have  this  fact  so  constantly 
recalled.  But  Laveleye  went  on :  — 

"  France  suffers  still  frightful  results  from  St.  Bartholo- 
mew and  the  Revocation  of  the  Edict  of  Nantes,  those 
two  great  blows  at  liberty  of  conscience.  The  thing 
most  wanting  in  France  is  men  who,  without  breaking 
with  tradition,  shall  nevertheless  accept  the  new  ideas. 
The  republicans  are  usually  hostile  or  indifferent  to  every 
religious  idea,  and,  like  their  ancestors  the  revolutionists  of 
the  last  century,  they  lack  a  basis  on  which  to  build  a  solid 
structure.  Those  who  defend  religious  ideas  wish  to  revive 
the  ancien  regime,  and  are  obstacles  in  the  way  of  reform." 

Or  take  this  in  specific  reference  to  two  or  three 
of  the  political  forms  in  which  the  amiable  defects  of 
the  French  people  find  expression,  — this  people  so 
given  to  not  looking  before  they  leap,  so  much  do  they 
love  partial  glimpses  of  ideas-in-themselves,  and  so 
lacking  are  they  in  a  pertinacious  science :  — 

"  The  misfortune  of  France  is  that,  pursuing  liberty 
with  passion,  she  has  never  desired  to  take  the  road  that 
leads  thither.  She  has  destroyed  independent  bodies,  anni- 
hilated local  autonomies,  centralised  all  functions,  accorded 
all  power  to  irresponsible  agents,  rendered  impossible  all 


DEMOCRACY.  129 

legal  resistance,  and  raised  thus  a  colossus  who  absorbs  all 
the  national  life,  and  who,  drunk  with  his  omnipotence,  has 
too  often  brought  the  country  to  its  destruction.  France 
does  not  hesitate  to  overthrow  dynasties,  she  does  not  dare 
to  make  up  her  mind  to  restrain  the  exorbitant  preroga- 
tives of  power  which  provoke  these  incessant  revolutions; 
on  the  contrary,  after  each  crisis  she  increases  them,  thinking 
thus  better  to  assure  the  stability  of  political  institutions. 
It  is  time  to  return  from  this  mistake  j  the  sphere  of  action 
of  the  sovereign  power  must  be  restrained  in  every  way,  by 
cutting  up  the  administration  into  independent  services 
which  shall  not  be  hierarchical,  by  re-establishing  political 
institutions,  and  by  powerfully  arming  citizens  against  the 
arbitrary  encroachment  of  functionaries.  Then  only  will 
the  name  of  the  Kepublic  become  synonymous  with  that 
of  liberty." 

A  solution,  a  brave  solution!  But  this  solution, 
however  logical,  and  plausible  as  it  is,  must  not  be  taken 
immediately  as  ultimate.  So  we  might  take  it,  and 
with  assurance,  were  it  not  that  we  are  living  in  the 
"  nineteenth  century  "  and  at  its  close ;  that  this  means 
the  whole  vague  series  of  new  facts  —  psychologic,  spir- 
itual, mechanical  —  of  which  I  have  been  speaking  as 
now  beginning  their  work  in  renovation  of  the  modern 
man,  and  in  the  negativing  of  the  old  historical  teach- 
ings of  analogy;  and  were  it  not  that  in  general  all 
these  fresh  moments  of  time  are  to  be  studied  by 
political  scientists  "  on  their  own  merits,  as  the  ex- 
pression is,  and  within  their  own  conditions.  And 


130  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

thus  it  is  reasonable  to  suggest  that  perhaps  this  solu- 
tion, so  suitable  apparently  at  the  moment,  needs  not 
after  all  be  applied  in  France,  because  there  may  be 
reasons  why  in  that  country  the  nation,  in  its  progress 
ahead  of  the  new  causes  and  amid  the  fresh  conditions 
named,  may  outstrip  the  necessity  for  it,  discovering 
thus  new  and  unexpected  safeguards  against  the 
threatened  dangers,  and  securing  safety  even  while 
preserving,  and  indeed  increasing,  the  impulse  which  is 
more  natural  to  Frenchmen  towards  unity  and  centrali- 
sation. And  furthermore  it  is  equally  reasonable  to 
suggest  that  perhaps  to  the  United  Kingdom  of  Great 
Britain  and  Ireland,  for  reasons  quite  different, — the 
entire  nations  of  these  islands  not  being  as  yet  so  im- 
pressible by  these  new  causes  and  fresh  conditions, — 
this  solution  of  a  particular  kind  has  a  more  pressing 
plausibility.  Yet,  after  all,  the  passage  quoted  is  ex- 
cellent, though  the  reservations  are  important,  and  hint 
that  politics  is  very  difficult  if  treated  as  a  science. 
They  are  at  least  too  important  for  Laveleye  to  have 
asserted  so  categorically  in  another  place  that  under  all 
conditions  "  the  autonomy  of  provinces  is  the  citadel 
of  liberty,"  and  then,  backed  by  this  generalisation, 
to  have  said,  as  he  did  elsewhere :  — 

"  Closing  their  eyes  to  the  clearest  teachings  of  history, 
French  republicans  do  not  wish  at  any  price  for  provincial 
autonomies ;  and  yet  without  them  the  Republic  is  only  a 


DEMOCRACY.  131 

vain  word,  and  it  will  with  difficulty  succeed  in  maintain- 
ing itself." 

Laveleye  is  to  my  mind  much  more  critical,  and  less 
in  need  of  being  fenced  about  by  reservation,  when  he 
writes  as  follows  about  the  slower  social  evolution  of 
England  certain  things  which  history  may  legitimately 
be  left  to  teach  him,  for  he  is  referring  to  changes 
which,  whether  they  will  or  not  take  place  in  the  way 
he  names,  in  any  case  must  occur  (saving  only  the  hope 
that  always  resides  in  "  intervention  by  the  state  ") 
before  the  new  political  facts  to  which  I  am  always 
alluding  as  liable  to  vitiate  the  best-conceived  panaceas 
derived  from  history,  can  seriously  complicate  the 
problem. 

"  In  England,"  he  says,  "  where  property  is  centred  in  the 
hands  of  a  small  number  of  families,  where  labourers  in  the 
field  are  shut  out  from  the  possession  of  the  soil  they  culti- 
vate, where  the  innumerable  masses  of  industrial  labourers 
have  declared  war  on  their  masters,  where  finally  the  fact 
of  inequality  is  becoming  patent  to  all  eyes,  the  danger 
[of  social  explosion,  taking  some  such  practical  direction  as 
seizure  of  the  land  and  a  fresh  division  of  it]  is  greater. 
The  rural  labourer  is  not  as  yet  aroused  by  aspirations  for 
equality,  workmen  in  the  towns  are  not  accustomed  to 
arms,  nor  have  they  the  revolutionary  tradition,  and  the 
average  middle-class  citizen,*  strengthened  by  party  strug- 
gle and  by  self-government,  will  know  better  than  else- 
where how  to  defend  himself.  But  these  conditions  will 
1  La  bourgeoisie. 


132  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

not  last.  Suppose  that  in  some  years,  when  ideas  of  social 
re-organisation  shall  have  invaded  the  whole  working  class, 
a  great  war  breaks  out,  stopping  commerce  and  closing  the 
workshops;  the  consequences  might  be  frightful,  for  the 
social  revolution  would  not  be  limited  to  the  capital,  as  in 
France,  it  would  extend  like  a  fire  to  the  manufacturing 
towns  and  the  fields,  and  would  have  but  one  end  to  pur- 
sue, namely,  to  place  property  in  the  hands  of  all." 

This  "  frightful "  prospect  is  fortunately  chimerical 
to  any  but  the  anarchist  soul,  and  things  will  very 
likely  not  take  this  course ;  but  Laveleye  was  stating 
here  a  supposition,  and  his  conclusions  from  such 
premises  were  logical  enough,  and  the  whole  passage 
is  suggestive.  A  certain  light  falls  upon  it  from  the 
remark  on  the  fact  of  the  absence  in  England  of  a 
written  constitution. 

"This  regime,"  he  says,  "which  certainly  has  some  ad- 
vantages, is  perhaps  attended  with  no  serious  inconveniences 
so  long  as  there  reigns  a  respect  for  traditions  and  ancien 
laws.     I  think  it  perilous,  however,  in  democratic  epochs 
where  rules  a  taste  for  novelty,  with  the  love  of  what  i 
called  progress.'* 

Well,  all  these  passages  are  interesting,  althoug] 
clearly  they  need  to  be  less  unreservedly  expressed 
But  they  represent  Laveleye,  I  believe,  in  his  mos 
daring  moods,  at  his  critical  strongest.  He  clearly 
felt  that  there  is  a  certain  insecurity,  and  I  should  be 
the  last  to  affirm  that  he  was  wrong,  inherent  in 


DEMOCRACY.  133 

workable  hypotheses.  Consider  for  a  little  his  chief 
attempt  pointedly  to  formulate  a  really  inclusive  poli- 
tical induction  true  for  all  conditions,  save  probably  in 
space  of  four  dimensions,  where  the  novelty  of  the 
surroundings  could  not  in  the  least  make  up  for  the 
fresh  harassing  complications.  His  attempt  results  in 
this:— 

Equality  of  political  rights  and  inequality  in 
social  conditions  is  the  great  peril  of  the  modern 
democracies.  f 

This  is  so  true  an  utterance  that  it  deserves  all  ifce  ^V"J 
illustration  that  Laveleye  gave  it  in  his  two  large  . _ ^. 
umes.     But,    full  of  virtue  as  it  is,  it  is  almost  his 

ly  divining-rod,  and  it  is  powerless  to  conjure  the 
'uture.  It  is  scarcely  conceivable  that  any  one  could 
3e  more  complete  than  he  in  the  process  of  proving 
;his  admirable  generalisation,  on  which  undoubtedly 
langs  much  of  the  law  and  the  prophecy  of  "  political 
science."  Laveleye  illuminates  this  idea;  develops 
it;  tentatively  explodes  it;  giving  every  fact  and 
critic  hostile  to  him  their  turn,  as  is  the  true  breeding 
of  the  really  urbane  writer  of  the  Republic  of  Letters ; 
demonstrates  it  with  a  cumulative  force  of  argument 
;hat  is  convincing.  Yet,  among  conclusions  of  great 
value  this  one  is  not  so  really  important  after  all,  for 
there  is  still  that  entire  interesting  series  of  other 
questions  which,  after  this  generalisation  is  accepted, 


134  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

come   crying  to  us  all  for  an  answer,  but  in  which 
Laveleye  will  not  try  in  the  least  to  help  us. 

Granted  the  discovery  of  this  rather  beautiful  but 
unsatisfying  axiom,  as  vague  in  its  suggestion  as  to 
the  future  as  that  other  much  admired  one  of  Bishop 
Butler's  about  the  present,  that  things  will  be  as  they 
will  be,  what  nevertheless  can  it  do  for  us  ?  For  this 
future,  as  I  said,  is  immediately  to  be  in  many  re- 
spects radically  different  from  the  past,  —  immediately, 
and  that  is  the  point.  Take,  for  instance,  the  United 
States  of  North  America,  which  has  already  begun  to 
record  its  really  exacting  problems.  Two  centuries 
and  a  half  in  New  England  solved  nothing.  They 
demonstrated  only  what  English  piety  and  religion 
and  the  English  sense  of  justice  can  accomplish  when 
left  to  approximately  uninterrupted  development, 
without  weeds  of  tradition  or  convention  to  choke 
them.  But  then  the  century  began  to  change  its 
character.  Steam  and  electricity  and  the  newspaper 
displayed  an  absolutely  transforming  activity.  There 
especially,  but  in  general  and  everywhere,  it  is  be- 
coming evident  that  between  the  man  of  the  immediate 
future  and  the  man  of  the  corresponding  quarter  of 
even  the  latest  century  there  is  to  be  a  much  greater 
and  more  radical  difference  than  between  the  man  of 
the  late  last  century  and  the  man  of,  for  instance,  — 
one  may  really  say  this  safely,  without  having  been  an 


DEMOCRACY.  135 

ancient,  —  old  Rome  or  Carthage  or  Alexandria. l  New 
emotions,  new  relations,  new  possibilities,  new  affec- 
tions, new  conditions  in  general,  are  arriving  with 
such  astounding  rapidity  that  the  world  is  even  now 
almost  a  fresh  one,  and  the  past  facts  of  history  are 
becoming  less  and  less  applicable.  "  Political  science, " 
now  nothing  but  a  name,  already  demands  the  seer. 
And  it  is  in  the  great  recent  nations,  lying  apart  from 
the  European  and  Asiatic  network,  that  the  new  con- 
ditions can  be  best  studied.  But  if  all  this  is  true, 
what  remarkable  force  can  there  be  in  the  axiom  that 
"  equality  of  political  rights  and  inequality  in  social 

[  conditions  is  the  great  peril  of  modern  democracies  "  ? 
Yes,  equality  of  political  rights  and  inequality  in 
social  conditions  is  the  great  peril  of  modern  demo- 
cracies. But  one  thing  that  is  certain  is  that  equality 
of  political  rights  is  largely  all  but  assured  now 

1    throughout  the  world.     To  be  the  son  of  the  even 

1  There  is  this  difference  between  the  present  moment  and 

|    that  equally  romantic  awakening  of  the  Renascence,  namely, 

I    that  the  changes  which  human  nature  is  now  undergoing  are, 

I    while  perhaps  not  so  obvious  and  striking  in  degree  as  then, 

|    yet  so  subtle  and  so  fresh  as  to  be  almost  radical.    To-day  it  is 

human  nature  as  a  whole,  men  as  mutually  responsible  members 

of  a  community,  that  is  being  altered ;  not  merely  this  or  that 

privileged  mind  thrilled  with  the  new  cry,  "  Back  to  Homer  and 

the  Gods  and  the  Beautiful  Christ  Himself."    See  an  important 

study  on  Sebastien  Castellion,  sa  Vie  et  son  (Euvre  (1516-1563), 

by  M.  Ferdinand  Buisson.    Paris :  Hachette. 


136  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

immediate  future  is  to  be  the  heir  of  these  equal  poli- 
tical rights  much  of  the  world  over.  That  this  is  not 
undoubtedly  the  drift  there  is  left  to  us  no  chance  of 
suspicion,  and  especially  since  the  book  of  Laveleye. 
But  out  of  this  comes  the  important  matter :  Will  this 
democratic  future  give  birth  to  the  distinctly  distress- 
ing peril  with  which  it  seems  big  ?  Is  there  nothing 
to  keep  from  the  eyes  of  the  high  gods  the  monster 
that  one  can  imagine  will  be  produced  by  the  union 
of  the  chaste  Minerva  of  political  rights  and  the  hairy 
brutal  Briareus  of  unequal  social  conditions?  Are 
these  two  irreconcilable  things,  existing  together, 
positively  to  produce  so  unexampled  horror,  whatever 
we  may  do,  or  whatever  may  be  done  ?  Are  there  no 
discernible  causes  tending  to  the  ultimate  extinction 
of,  or  else  the  taming  of  the  savagery  in,  inequality  of 
conditions?  And  if  there  are  such  causes,  what  are 
they,  and  when  may  we  welcome  them  ?  Where  lies 
the  hope  for  the  Democracy  ?  We  would  like  to  know 
all  about  the  new  facts.  It  is  possible,  it  seems  to 
me,  to  discuss  them  much  more  bravely  than  Laveleye 
has  done,  and  yet  not  lose  one's  head.  Indeed,  at  this 
moment  of  time  is  it  possible,  without  discussing 
them,  to  be  scientific? 

These,  then,  are  some  matters  of  pre-eminent  import- 
ance in  this  vague  field,  in  comparison  to  which  all 
others  are  clearly  of  less  interest.  And  to  try  to  look 


DEMOCRACY.  137 

at  such  matters  closely,  at  all  events  to  answer  such 
questions  plausibly,  though  tentatively,  would  give  a 
certain  endurance  to  a  piece  of  writing  on  these  sub- 
jects. Laveleye,  however,  has  not  seriously  touched 
them.  Yet,  although  his  scheme  disappointingly  does 
not  admit  of  anxiety  in  such  inquiry,  how  difficult  it 
would  be  to  make  much  of  a  list  of  other  things  which 
it  does  not  contain.  On  "  right, "  "  justice ,"  "  liberty ;  " 
the  forms  of  states  and  their  development ;  the  virtues 
and  vices  and  tendencies  inherent  in  each  form ;  the 
"  relation  of  state  and  church;  "  the  question  of  "  educa- 
tion ; "  of  democracy  seen  through  both  ends  of  a 
telescope,  and  of  all  that  can  give  it  dignity  or  render  it 
unstable ;  of  combinations  among  classes ;  of  the  whole 
"  electoral  regime  "  and  of  parliaments,  —  what  field  or 
corner  has  he  not  traversed  or  ransacked,  and  always 
with  plausibility  when  he  tells  us  the  result  of  his 
observations!  At  the  start,  especially  in  definition  of 
;he  word  "  state, "  his  analysis  is  very  clear ;  and  so 
much  depends  on  nice  analysis,  on  clear  definition! 
But  then  in  the  midst  of  it  all,  when  he  says  a  thing  like 
this,  "  However,  progress  in  civilisation  has  been 
possible  only  by  action  on  the  part  of  the  state, "  one 
wishes  such  analysis  had  stopped  just  short  of  it. 
Yet  more  fully  and  with  more  reserve  he  says,  "  To- 
day the  mission  of  the  state  is  no  longer  to  force  the 
citizen  to  submit  to  its  ends,  but  to  make  laws  which 


138  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

allow  the  individual  man  to  arrive,  by  his  own  efforts, 
at  the  whole  joy  of  the  fruit  of  his  labour  and  the 
complete  development  of  his  faculties." 

That  Laveleye  contradicts  both  of  these  utterances, 
in  themselves  to  a  large  extent  mutually  contradictory, 
often  throughout  his  discussion,  arguing  now  for  "  indi- 
vidualism," and  yet  again  being  dead  against  it,  simply 
because  he  is  impatient  and  is  rather  eclectic  than 
original,  is  not  so  much  worth  pointing  out,  however, 
as  that  in  themselves  the  remarks  just  quoted  are 
indefensible.  It  really  is  not  true  that  "  progress  in 
civilisation  has  been  possible  only  by  action  on  the 
part  of  the  state. "  Much  depends,  as  I  said,  on  clear 
definition.  But  here  there  can  be  no  doubt  whatever  of 
the  meaning  of  the  word  "  state, "  namely,  "  the  govern- 
ment, "  "  the  public  powers. "  And  how  untrue,  there- 
fore, the  sentence  is !  The  "  progress  of  civilisation  " 
has  gone  on  with  the  help  of  the  occasionally  happy 
and  harmonious  working  of  at  least  many  other 
forces  than  those  directed  by  governments  or  public 
powers, — by  all  the  great  forces  of  art  and  invention 
and  commerce  and  discovery,  and  by  an  interminable  list 
besides.  This  is  a  commonplace,  and  of  course  it 
was  all  clear  enough  to  Laveleye ;  and  yet  he  left  such 
sentences  as  these  in  his  manuscript.  He  would  have 
condemned  as  quickly  as  a  New  Englishman  the  spirit 
of  those  great  institutions  which ,  established  theoreti- 


DEMOCRACY.  139 

cally  in  the  interests  of  "  civilisation  "  (as  a  matter  of 
fact  how  rarely  they  are !),  do  all  they  can  to  retard 
it,  by  insisting  that  they  have  engaged  the  entire  time 
of  their  servants,  as  well  as  their  ideas,  their  inventions, 
their  brains.  This,  a  widespread  system  in  England 
and  in  France  and  in  many  another  country, —  does  not 
Mr.  Eudyard  Kipling  tell  us  how  it  exists  in  India  ?  — 
is  of  course  directly  opposed  to  the  "  spirit  of  progress, " 
but  it  is  citable  here  because  it  illustrates  the  simple 
fact  that  advance  in  civilisation  is  possible  even  without 
action  011  the  part  of  the  state,  and  because  it  was  not 
scientific  in  Laveleye  thus  to  let  it  slip  off  his  pen. 

Indeed,  there  are  good  reasons  why  "  state  interven- 
tion "  can  never  be  a  supreme  ideal,  vigorously  as  we  all 
appear  to  be  pushing  to  that  ideal.  For  the  state,  as 
the  word  is  used  in  that  phrase,  is,  for  the  most  part, 
only  the  active  will  of  so  much  of  the  nation  as  ex- 
ercises its  powers,  having  attained  various  individual 
expression.  Perhaps  it  ought  to  be  the  active  will 
of  only  the  best  in  the  nation.  If  for  any  length  of 
time  the  state  fails  to  do  the  will  of  the  active  nation, 
it  becomes  to  the  nation  odious,  and  things  then  tend 
towards  tyranny ;  for  the  state  may  be  said  to  be  no 
longer  "  constitutional. "  Of  course,  therefore,  tyranny 
can  develop  in  a  democracy  almost  as  well  as  in  a 
monarchy.  The  supremely  ideal  state,  however,  im- 
plies the  supremely  ideal  nation ;  and  in  the  supremely 


140  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

ideal  nation  individual  enlightenment  and  capacity 
would  be  so  pervasive  that  any  such  activity  on  the  part 
of  the  state  as  is  denned  by  the  common  notion  of  the 
word  "  intervention  "  —  namely,  a  kind  of  paternal  and 
maternal  assumption  of  responsibility,  a  dry-nursing 
of  the  community  —  would  be  unnecessary.  In  fact, 
the  phrase  would  then  mean  nothing,  inasmuch  as  the 
state,  as  a  separate  entity,  being  non-existent,  being 
nothing  but  a  name,  the  word  "  state  "  would  be  syno- 
nymous with  the  word  "  nation, "  and  the  government 
would  exist  simply  as  a  frictionless  machine  absolutely 
competent  to  translate  into  action  the  entire  thought 
of  the  community,  and  the  whole  community  would 
be  in  an-archy,  in  heaven;  dull  and  harpless,  yet  in 
heaven.  But  as  the  ideal  condition  does  not  now  exist, 
any  practical  politics  as  well  as  "  political  science  "  is 
forced  to  deal  with  the  real,  the  obvious  state  in  the 
circumstances  of  its  stunted  development,  and  in  the 
winter  of  its  discontent;  and  as  an  historical  fact  of 
the  past  and  the  present,  its  great  end,  speaking  gener- 
ally, has  been,  and  is,  and  really  it  appears  to  me  should 
be,  to  maintain  all  the  results  of  past  achievements 
in  general  rights  and  privileges,  by  conservative  insis- 
tence on  the  universally  binding  force  of  statute  and 
constitutional  law.  This,  its  domestic,  is  ideally  its 
chief,  function.  Of  course  in  external  relations  it  is 
like  a  ship's  figure-head,  it  is  the  nation's  ambassador. 


DEMOCRACY.  141 

But  for  the  present,  and  at  all  events  for  the  future, 
in  the  enlightened  nation  the  chief  moral  character- 
istics, if  one  may  speak  thus  figuratively,  should  be 
obedience  and  inertia.  For  the  progress  towards  poli- 
tical right,  towards  complete  abolition  of  exclusive 
privileges,  towards  art  and  towards  science,  towards 
all  that  makes  up  our  slight  civilisation,  is  not  depen- 
dent and  should  not  be  dependent  on  the  state,  how- 
ever much  the  state  has  it  in  its  power  to  contribute 
to  progress.  It  is  the  separate  members  of  the  nation 
who  will,  as  human  nature  exists,  care  for  this,  and  the 
state  will  go  fast  enough,  in  all  conscience,  if  it  simply 
reflect  this  advance,  and  recognise  it  only  with  the 
utmost  caution.  In  a  word,  if  there  really  be  some 
place  for  everything,  the  state  is  the  place  for  procras- 
tination, conservatism,  and  irritating  "  red  tape. " 

But  undoubtedly  now  at  this  moment  of  awakening 
knowledge,  when  pretty  nearly  all  men  are  becoming 
alert  to  needs  of  which  they  had  not  thought  before, 
they  will  press  more  and  more  loudly  in  supplication 
to  the  state  to  relieve  them  quickly  in  their  difficulties 
and  to  legislate  in  their  behalf.  If  the  demands  are 
intelligent  and  widespread,  and  clearly  in  the  interests 
of  justice,  the  state  may  be  said  figuratively  to  have 
a  duty  to  legislate  in  response.  But  is  it  not  clear 
that  this  is  not,  properly  speaking,  "  state  intervention  " 
at  all  1  It  is  only  the  liking  for  the  fair,  the  just,  the 


142  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

equal,  with  the  hatred  of  privilege  (which  mark  the 
advance  of  civilisation),  being  historically  recorded; 
their  attaining  incarnation,  as  it  were,  in  tangible  forms. 
And  it  is  not  "  state  intervention  "  at  all,  save  by  a 
confusion  of  terms,  or  in  the  same  way  that  a  man 
may  be  said  to  intervene  in  the  conduct  of  his  own 
life  when,  having  lived  for  a  long  time  in  one  particu- 
lar fashion,  he  decides,  for  this  or  that  reason,  to  live  in 
another  and  different  way.  So  that  while,  as  the  years 
go  on,  henceforth  the  cry  for  this  wonderful  panacea 
will  become  louder  and  louder,  yet,  bustle  henceforth 
as  the  state  may  and  as  it  will,  let  no  one  be  deceived. 
The  state  is  not  really  "  intervening, "  after  all,  but 
it  is  only  reflecting,  in  most  cases  very  incautiously, 
very  bunglingly,  very  absurdly,  the  growingly  expand- 
ing, complicated,  life  of  communities,  and  showing 
thus  very  little  knowledge  of  where  its  real  virtue  lies, 
namely,  in  obedience  and  inertia. 

Now,  Laveleye  sees,  with  Dupont- White,  how 
rapidly,  all  about  the  planet,  "  intervention  "  is  grow- 
ing to  be  an  alluring  idea, — one  thinks  of  the  cigarettes 
of  Rhode  Island,  and  one  sees  that  this  is  so ;  how  Eng- 
lish and  American  legislation  in  particular  have  shown 
what,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  Saxon  traditions 
as  to  the  almost  divine  right  of  the  individual  man, 
is  regarded  in  many  minds  as  really  an  astounding 
change.  But  as  to  why  all  this  is  taking  place  he  is 


DEMOCRACY.  143 

not  very  clear,  and  the  real  nature  of  the  change  he 
makes  no  attempt  to  define. 

But  it  is  a  pleasure  after  these  evidences  of  impa- 
tience, of  lack  of  compactness,  to  remember  how  safe 
and  satisfying  Laveleye  was  capable  of  being.  In  the 
chapters  on  the  parliamentary  regime  and  its  vices  in 
this  latest  book,  he  is  not  only  quite  at  his  best,  but  he 
is  at  a  very  good  point  of  value  indeed.  He  is  not 
only  clear,  —  he  was  always  that,  —  but  he  is  critical 
and  he  is  informing.  Here  his  immensely  impressive 
acquaintance  with  the  large  class  of  books  and  docu- 
ments containing  the  indispensable  mass  of  political 
facts  that  are  American,  sources  very  little  known  in 
England,  on  the  Continent  scarcely  known  at  all,  stood 
him  in  good  stead.  Enamoured  particularly  of  the 
constitutional  monarchy  when  it  works  at  its  most 
frictionless  best,  as  he  thought  under  the  Leopolds  of 
Belgium, —  though  all  that  appears  to  me  the  happiest 
of  accidents,  —  he  still  depicts  with  a  lucidity  and  a 
completeness  that  show  his  admiration  for  quite  an- 
other governmental  form,  many  advantages  attending 
the  working  of  the  constitution  of  the  United  States 
in  North  America;  and  in  general  he  compares  the 
North  American  system  with  the  English  with  real 
penetration  and  knowledge.  But  here  again  at  the 
threshold  of  the  interesting  problems  he  laid  down  his 
pen.  There  are  many  things  here  that  seem  to  have 


144  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

escaped  him.  He  says  there  are  to  be  dangers  in  the 
future,  more  even  than  exist  at  present.  That,  how- 
ever, he  told  us  in  his  formula  about  "  equal  rights  " 
and  "  unequal  social  conditions, "  so  that  the  warning 
is  not  very  impressive.  Yet  there  are  also  two  lumi- 
nous passages  like  these :  — 

"The  natural  limits  of  a  democratic  republic  were  in  the 
old  days  the  walls  of  a  city.  To-day  the  book,  the  news- 
paper, the  telegraph,  bring  to  all,  at  the  same  moment,  the 
same  impression,  and  extend  the  circle  of  the  agora  to  the 
frontiers  of  a  language  and  the  limits  of  a  continent. 
Thus  one  of  the  great  obstacles  to  the  establishment  of 
republics  is  done  away  with  by  the  mere  progress  in  technical 
inventions.1  ,  .  .  For  more  than  two  hundred  years  we  have 
been  seeing  in  New  England  societies  freely  governing 
themselves,  by  electing  all  authorities  without  exception, 
political,  administrative,  judiciary,  ecclesiastical,  without 
having  any  necessity  of  a  king's  intervention  in  their 
streets,  or  of  a  pope's  in  their  consciences.  ...  In  order 
that  the  same  regime  should  be  established  and  maintained 
in  Europe,  it  would  be  enough  for  the  European  peoples  in 
all  classes  of  society  to  acquire  illumination  as  sane,  a 
good  sense  as  solid,  a  religion  as  reasonable,  as  the  inhabi- 
tants of  New  England.  We  are,  alas!  far  from  that  con- 
dition, and  no  one  can  tell  when  we  shall  reach  it,  for  we 
do  not  suspect  even  the-  distance,  that  separates  us  ;  but 
who  would  dare  say  that  the  goal  will  never  be  reached  ? " 

Ah,  here  were  the  timely  cues!  Why  were  they 
not  followed?  Yet  Laveleye  was  a  wise  man,  and 

1  The  italics  are  mine. 


DEMOCRACY.  145 

perhaps  here  his  silence  was  wisdom.  The  way  is 
so  very  difficult  that  it  is  only  for  the  surest-footed. 
Who  of  us  has  the  courage  to  enter  upon  it  1  Who 
thinks  himself  strong  enough  to  venture  the  saying  of 
the  enduring  thing  upon  so  vast  a  theme  ? 

Yet  there  are  reasons  why  it  is  worth  while  to 
have  notions  on  this  question,  vast  and  all  hut  pre- 
sumptuous as  it  is.  I  may  say  frankly  that  I  see  but 
two  solutions,  and  that  one  of  them,  while  popular 
and  possible  in  scholastic  argument,  seems  to  me 
highly  improbable  as  the  one  likely  to  be  evolved  by 
events.  This  solution  is  a  return  to  the  ages  of  faith. 

Upon  what  painful  moments  have  we  happened! 
The  assurances,  the  attachments,  which  made  life 
tolerable  for  the  classes  at  the  bottom  of  the  social 
organism;  the  consolations  and  illusions  of  religious 
devotion  making  natural  for  members  of  these  classes 
the  spirit  of  martyrdom ;  the  quiet  moods  leading  to 
endurance  of  privation  and  of  suffering,  and  sought 
for  even  by  the  devout  poor  in  the  hope  of  the  far-off 
joys  of  "  heaven, "  when  the  time  should  come  for 
"  the  last  to  be  first, "  and  for  the  great  "  reversal  of 
human  judgments  "  to  be  an  accomplished  fact,  — all 
these  causes  of  peace  and  conservatism  are  vanishing 
from  the  earth ;  and  louder  and  louder,  echoing  about 
the  planet,  rise  the  cries  of  the  people  who  suffer;  the 

indignant  bursts  of  men  too  long  repressed,  and  now 

10 


146  PATRIOTISM   AND   SCIENCE. 

with  their  opening  thought  demanding,  fist  in  air,  a 
share  in  the  fruits  of  the  common  activity.  So  long 
as  men  believe  in  a  God  of  compensation;  so  long  as 
no  one  can  say  them  nay  when  they  affirm  that  they 
catch  his  whispers  in  their  ear,  bidding  them  bide 
their  time;  so  long  as  men  believe  that  in  their 
"  Father's  house  are  many  mansions, "  and  that  one 
day  a  freehold  will  be  theirs,  with  milk  and  cheese 
and  gardens  for  their  children,  and  the  sky  of  summer 
over  them  for  ever;  so  long  as  mothers  know  in  their 
heart  of  hearts  that  sorrow  is  God's  will,  and  that  in 
the  end,  after  the  trials  of  this  "  Vale  of  Tears, "  they 
shall  "  see  Him  face  to  face, "  and  hear  His  voice 
bidding  them  enter,  "  good  and  faithful  servants,  into 
the  joy  of  their  Lord, "  —  so  long  will  they  work  their 
fingers  to  the  bone,  wearing  always  on  their  face  the 
beatific  smile ;  so  long  will  the  "  Song  of  the  Shirt " 
be  really  a  paean  of  rejoicing;  so  long  will  the  factory 
bell,  tolling  in  the  grey  of  the  early  morning,  an- 
nounce for  them  the  dawning  of  a  day  bringing  them, 
whatever  its  miseries,  nearer  to  the  Gates  of  Pearl; 
and  so  long  will  there  be  a  quiet  earth. 

But  what  a  moment  for  them,  what  a  moment  for 
us,  when  these  dreams  are  gone !  What  then  ?  Tra- 
gedy of  tragedies  for  us  all.  Woe  to  their  fellows  when 
men  wake  to  the  truth  that  they  have  been  dupes! 
For  they  will  no  longer  suffer  and  be  still.  Then  let 


DEMOCRACY.  147 

society  look  to  its  libraries  and  museums,  and  the  cour- 
tesan of  the  great  cities  to  her  lap-dog  and  her  violet 

powder. 

"  Un  certain  ressort  cache, 

Tout  h,  coup  etant  lache, 

Fait  tomber,  ber  ber, 

Fait  sauter,  ter  ter, 

Fait  tomber, 

Fait  sauter, 

Fait  voler  la  tSte. 

C'est  vraiment  honnete  !  " 

And  it  is  to  this  sort  of  awakening  that  we  have  all 
but  come  again  to-day.  In  my  ears  while  I  write  are 
the  pi?ig,  ping  of  the  pistols,  and  the  louder  explosion 
of  the  guns,  on  the  river  bank  at  Homestead  in  the 
State  founded  by  the  man  of  the  peaceful  name  of 
Penn.  So  that  one  is  all  but  inclined  to  say,  with  M. 
Kenan :  "  I  cannot  conceive  how,  without  the  old 
dreams,  ever  can  be  rebuilt  the  foundations  of  a  noble 
and  a  happy  life. " 

Yes,  depend  upon  it,  this  pessimistic  view  of  civili- 
sation, but  for  one  thing,  is  exact.  The  particular 
"  noble  and  the  happy  life  "  of  the  past,  of  the  disin- 
tegrating present  even,  it  is  clear  enough,  will  not 
return.  For  the  "  old  dreams, "  as  truly  as  have  gone 
the  soaring  harmonies  of  the  Pindaric  song,  are  vanish- 
ing from  the  world.  And  instead  is  the  sound  in 
every  country  of  this  planet  of  the  army  of  Democracy, 


148  PATRIOTISM   AND   SCIENCE. 

each  soldier  beating  time  before  the  triumphant  march 
with  fresh  flags  and  symbols  at  his  head.  The  Huns 
and  Vandals  of  the  Middle  Age  are  only  the  rudest 
symbol  of  such  an  army.  By  systems  of  barbaric 
"  protection "  the  states  think  for  the  moment  to 
erect  their  dikes  against  the  international  tide.  But 
down  before  this  tide  state  and  Chinese  wall  of  tariff 
must  inevitably  go,  and  after  them  all  else  be  swept 
away,  — but  for  one  thing, —  in  the  common  destruc- 
tion. But  what  is  this  check,  this  solution,  of  our 
crisis?  It  seems  to  me  to  inhere  in  the  activity  of 
forces,  the  dignity  of  which  it  is  the  mode  to-day  to 
question ;  in  the  good,  side  by  side  with  the  dangerous, 
in  that  great  laic  movement  of  the  growing  time 
known  vaguely  as  the  "  modern  spirit. " 

Laic?  But  the  word  is  French  rather  than  Eng- 
lish ;  and  as  yet,  in  communities  of  people  who  speak 
English,  the  term  has  no  force,  because  no  vogue.  On 
the  continent  of  Europe,  however,  laic  has  for  a  long 
time  now  been  growing  in  familiarity  as  a  name  for 
all  the  impulses  that  mark  the  temper  of  persons  re- 
sentful of  authority ;  it  is  less  exact  to  say,  but  briefer 
and  more  intelligible,  a  name  for  all  the  impulses  of 
the  "  people. "  Science  has  not  to  approve  or  condemn 
the  thing  thus  named.  Its  sole  business  is  to  draw 
attention  to  the  fact.  And  while,  therefore,  I  do  not 
venture  to  record  a  personal  opinion  as  to  the  value  of 


DEMOCRACY.  149 

this  spirit,  I  may  nevertheless  recall  its  existence. 
For  of  that  there  is  no  question.  A  fresh  spirit  is 
growing  on  our  planet,  growing  in  those  portions  of  it 
known  as  England  and  the  United  States  in  North 
America,  and  is  already  widely  extended  among  the 
older  "  Latin  nations, "  —  a  spirit  which,  having  at  first 
its  origin  in  a  feeling  of  reaction  against  ecclesiastical 
authority  alone,  is  rapidly  broadening  so  as  to  include 
in  it  the  entire  series  of  feelings  of  suspicion  of  all 
authority  whatsoever,  of  dislike  of  whatsoever  institu- 
tions and  compact  monopolizing  organisms;  and  it  is 
this  feeling,  binding  together  the  "  people  "  in  every 
country  east  and  west,  which  deserves  a  name,  and 
which,  in  want  of  a  better,  I  have  called  laic.  It  is 
the  laic  spirit  which  is  transforming  society,  to  which 
Authority  is  now  throwing  its  bribes,  which  is  de- 
manding to-day  socialistic  solutions  for  the  ills  which 
it  suffers,  and  with  which  pre-eminently  the  scientist 
and  the  philosopher  in  these  fields  have  now  to  deal. 
And  the  practical  question  is,  what,  if  the  contented 
and  the  happy  life  is  not  to  be  secured  by  a  revival  of 
the  old  faiths,  what  will  preserve  to  us  the  ancient 
tranquillity,  and  the  progress  of  a  quiet  evolution ;  for 
without  the  action  of  this  unknown  cause  we  shall  be 
exposed  to  a  dreadful  revolution,  which  the  quickly 
expanding  laic  spirit  indubitably  threatens. 

A    paragraph    in    M.    de    Cassagnac's   newspaper, 
L'Autorite,  recently  caught  my  eye :    "  On  mounting 


150  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

the  scaffold,  Kavachol's  last  cry  was,  Vive  la  Repiib- 
llque.  It  was  a  cry  from  the  heart.  The  Republic 
having  produced  Eavachol,  he,  in  dying,  salutes  his 
mother.  This  good-by  of  his  proves  that  Eavachol 
was  still  better  than  his  mother."  I  do  not  call 
special  attention  to  the  miserable  helplessness  of 
mood,  like  that  of  a  chained  dog  who  snarls,  betrayed 
in  unpatriotic  utterance  like  this,  which  implies  that 
the  present  regime  in  France  is  responsible  for  the 
anarchist  ideal ;  as  well  might  a  citizen  of  the  United 
States  of  North  America  accuse  Thomas  Jefferson  or 
Alexander  Hamilton  of  being  the  authors  of  the  mon- 
strous episode  of  rioting  at  Mr.  Carnegie's  workshops 
in  Pennsylvania.  The  noteworthy  observation  seems 
to  me  to  be  of  quite  another  sort;  it  is  that  this  pain- 
ful, this  ridiculous  commentary  on  the  career  of  the 
most  redoubtable  of  modern  anarchists  has  in  it  so 
much  of  truth,  at  all  events  so  much  of  plausibility, 
that,  when  given  the  immense  publicity  of  the  penny 
journal,  it  is  sure  to  produce  a  baneful  effect  on  unin- 
structed  minds  in  propagation  of  that  very  worst  in  our 
civilisation  which  it  is  to  be  the  privilege  of  the  con- 
temporaneous best  to  check.  For  it  is  not  enough  to 
say  that  the  French  Eepublic  produced  Eavachol ;  it 
is  not  to  speak  very  much  of  the  truth  to  say  that  the 
Eepublic  of  the  United  States  of  North  America 
caused  the  Homestead  riots ;  it  is  not  particularly  far- 


DEMOCRACY.  151 

seeing  to  fix  upon  the  English  Democracy  as  responsible 
for  the  Irish  "  Plan  of  Campaign. "  The  causes  of  these 
curious  phenomena  are  not  thus  hunted  to  their  origin 
and  named.  The  causes  are  more  remote,  and  are  co- 
extensive with  our  time  and  place.  Behind^the  French 
Republic,  and  the  political  compact  of  the  United 
States,  and  the  notions  in  the  minds  of  the  originators 
of  the  "  Plan  of  Campaign, "  and  behind,  for  instance, 
the  decentralising  activity  now  making  itself  felt  in 
the  Scandinavian  peninsula;  behind,  indeed,  every 
impulse  of  individual  thought  the  world  over,  are  as 
causes  —  and  we  need  go  no  farther  in  our  search  —  the 
immensely  surprising  results  of  mechanical  invention 
in  the  application  of  scientific  discovery,  the  entire 
series  of  ingenious  achievements  and  devices,  the  com- 
bined action  of  which  is  towards  the  unity  of  the 
human  race,  the  lessening  of  distance,  the  destruction 
of  time,  —  facts  which  give  to  any  special  moment  here 
on  this  planet  a  distinction  among  hitherto  recorded 
eras  which  is  absolutely  unique  and  overwhelmingly 
impressive,  as  much  in  its  obvious  suggestions  as  to 
the  future  of  the  progress  of  civilisation  on  Planet 
No.  3  of  this  astronomic  system  as  in  its  absorbing 
interest  in  the  interpretation  of  the  present;  facts, 
moreover,  —  and  this  is  the  fascinating  paradox, —  that, 
in  the  words  of  M.  de  Cassagnac's  paper,  are  indeed 
the  mother  of  the  Ravachols,  of  anarchy  and  of  revo- 


152  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

lution  and  of  every  one  of  those  social  dangers  which 
render  doubtful  the  happy  issue  of  civilisation;  but 
facts  which  will  in  the  end  themselves  be  saving,  for 
they  carry  within  themselves  as  much  of  peace  as  of 
war,  as  much  of  balm  as  of  irritant. 

It  is  really  not  surprising,  however,  that  it  is  neces- 
sary to  insist  on  this  paradox ;  to  point  out  the  obvious 
ameliorations  inherent  in  the  material  accomplishments 
of  our  extraordinary  century.  This  necessity  arises 
from  the  baneful  influence,  in  this  connection,  of  the 
two  great  conservative  and  most  widely  efficient  forces 
of  the  world, — the  forces  of  literature l  and  of  religion. 

1  It  is  partially,  perhaps  to  a  large  degree,  by  literature  that 
fresh  thought  gets  itself  expressed.  And  the  writings  gener- 
ally recognized  as  valuable,  to  which  we  have  given  the  name 
classic,  could  not  at  their  appearance,  in  any  proper  use  of 
language,  be  called  a  force  conservative.  But  the  large  literary 
impulse  for  the  late  four  hundred  years  has  been  always  in  obe- 
dience to  some  more  or  less  admirable  Authority.  Men  have 
taken  sides ;  they  have  formed  "  schools  ;  "  they  have  been  fol- 
lowers of  Homer  or  of  Hesiod,  "  Romanticists,"  "  Idealists,"  or 
"Realists;"  they  have  written  short  guides,  which  they  have 
called  rhetorics,  to  the  "  classics  ; "  in  general  they  have  loved 
the  idea  of  tbe  guild,  liked  uniformity,  dealt  with  the  past,  and 
suppressed  the  new.  This  may  or  may  not  have  been  wise,  it 
is  certain  not  to  be  the  way  of  the  future.  Up  to  our  moment 
most  literature,  apart  from  that  of  genius,  has  been  conserva- 
tive. All  this  the  laic  time  is  irremediably  changing,  and  the 
classical  note  will  one  day  be  as  undistinguished  as  the  paro- 
chial or  provincial  note  is  now. 


DEMOCRACY.  153 

Eeligion  is  necessarily  a  conservative  force.  And 
although  a  far  view  across  the  centuries  in  search  of 
the  religious  ideals  of  men  reveals  as  these  ideals  an 
immense  variety  of  affections,  a  hostk  of  allegiances 
having  so  little  in  common  that  the  entire  human 
attempt  towards  religion  must  be  admitted  to  have 
only  a  relative  value,  yet  the  famous  historical  results 
of  all  these  impulses,  whether  they  be  rude  or  elabo- 
rated, whether  they  be  conceptions  formed  in  the 
Gulf  of  Benin  or  on  the  banks  of  the  Jordan,  have  for 
science  this  bond  of  union:  they  are  all  sincere  en- 
deavours to  put  order  into  the  mind,  and  they  have 
had  their  historical  authority  just  in  proportion  to 
their  success  in  ordering  the  mind,  that  is,  in  propor- 
tion to  the  plausibility  of  their  appeal.  The  common 
lot  of  thinking  beings  is  sure  to  appear  to  them  so 
mysterious,  the  human  condition  is  so  appallingly 
incomprehensible,  that  men  obey  an  imperious  passion 
in  seeking  to  solve  it,  and  the  emotion  with  which 
they  cling  to  the  solutions,  to  their  philosophy  of 
things,  is  a  religious  emotion,  valuable  in  proportion 
to  its  individual  quality.  But  for  polities  the  indi- 
vidual quality  is  only  a  misfortune ;  for  polities  it  is 
highly  important  that  the  religious  passion  should  be 
as  much  as  possible  of  the  same  sort  among  all  the 
members  of  the  community;  and  the  principle  of 
Authority  will  therefore  always  be  cultivated  by  wise 


154  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

statesmen,  whose  chief  duty  it  appears  to  me  is  to 
retard  our  progress  to  the  utmost.  As  a  conservative 
force,  therefore,  the  present  dominant  religion  of  the 
two  Americas  and  of  Europe,  Christianity,  will  always 
be  more  than  respectfully  treated  by  wise  politicians; 
reciprocal  esteem  and  support  are  clearly  to  the  advan- 
tage of  both  forces;  such  collusion  is  in  the  interest 
of  the  peaceful  life  of  communities. 

But  those  who  have  the  interests  of  Christianity 
most  at  heart,  when  they  see  it  losing  some  of  its  hold 
to-day,  seek  to  base  its  authority  anew;  and  in  this 
fresh  activity  the  critic  beholds  a  curious  thing.  He 
assists  at  an  essential  alteration  in  the  very  philosophy 
of  this  religion,  a  change  which  is  one  of  the  most 
remarkable  of  contemporary  movements.  Christianity, 
however  illogical  historically  its  conduct  may  often 
have  been,  ought  always  to  have  taught  complete  re- 
jection of  the  world.  Its  honest  feeling  about  this 
world  has  been  one  of  uncompromising  pessimism.  It 
has  gone  out  into  the  world  with  the  cry  of  John  the 
Baptist:  Repent,  for  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  is 
at  hand.  But  its  most  fascinating  paradox  has  al- 
ways been  that  one  may  be  in  the  world,  yet  not  of  it. 
It  has  sought  the  world  forever,  but  only  to  save  it 
in  view  of  another.  To-day  what  do  we  see  1  We 
are  beholding  a  curious  and  a  radical  change.  We 
see  Christianity  entering  the  world  with  a  passion  for 


DEMOCRACY.  155 

its  amelioration  for  its  own  sake,  and  this  implies  a 
sense  that  the  world  is  for  its  own  sake  worthy  of  at- 
tention. The  Christian  passion  is  really  becoming 
political  in  a  new  and  striking  way.  Christianity  no 
longer  visages  men  as  doomed  and  lost.  In  Christian- 
ity's view  to-day  the  passengers  on  this  floating  island 
need  no  longer  be  trained  to  the  discipline  of  the  life- 
boat, and  taught  the  use  of  the  patent  life-belts,  for  a 
prospective  shipwreck  on  the  morrow.  Quite  another 
idea  has  entered  the  officers'  minds,  and  is  making 
itself  felt  in  the  ship's  discipline.  The  idea  which  is 
in  the  air,  and  about  which  the  ship's  crew  are  whis- 
pering on  and  off  the  watch,  is  merely  this,  that  the 
voyage  is  sure  to  be  longer  than  any  one  aboard  had 
once  supposed.  Meanwhile,  let  the  decks  be  scrubbed, 
the  brass  fittings  be  made  to  shine,  the  sails  furled 
more  trimly,  and  under  the  stars  let  occasional  dance 
and  song  beguile  the  hours.  While  we  voyage  let  us 
have  discipline,  but  let  us  be  as  happy  as  we  can. 
Better,  any  day,  than  the  mermaids  of  our  morbid  love, 
when  we  welcomed  the  end,  and  hated  the  sea-brine, 
and  cursed  our  mother  the  Earth  and  our  father  the  Sun, 
is  adoration  of  them  both,  and  the  breezy  life  afloat. 

Such  is  the  nature  of  the  interesting  change.  But 
the  idea  of  rejection  of  the  world,  which  has  been 
the  persistent  watchword  of  the  idealistic,  the  uncom- 
promisingly pessimistic,  though  in  the  main  the  utterly 


156  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

unimaginative  religion  of  the  West,  has  resulted  in  loud 
and  ridiculous  talk  in  the  disparagement  of  our  cen- 
tury —  the  century,  as  I  said,  of  uniquely  impressive 
achievements  —  as  a  time  of  materialism  to  be  lamented, 
of  money-getting  to  be  disparaged,  as  a  moment  of  low 
ideals  meriting  the  anathema  of  the  traditional  clergy, 
the  pathetic  but  melodious  censure  of  the  fastidious 
critic  of  art,  and  the  curious  inquiry  of  poets,  anxious 
for  the  prestige  of  their  pretty  fancies  run  into  bor- 
rowed moulds  of  measure,  as  to  whether  science  and 
the  fresh  time  are  to  lessen  the  value  of  their  academic 
palms.  This  absurd  conservative  cant  of  religion  and 
of  literature  has  been  on  the  lips  even  of  men  of 
genius.  It  has  resulted  in  unutterable  scorns  and  in 
prodigious  snobbish  assumptions  which  are  ridiculous, 
and  in  the  relegation,  I  may  add,  by  much  of  Euro- 
pean culture  of  the  community  of  the  North  American 
Republic  to  an  outer  darkness  of  uneducated  ideals, 
to  a  noisy  land  full  of  the  distracting  hum  of  a  great 
"  material "  life,  and  ignorant  of  the  "  things  of  the 
spirit. " 

Material !     Things  of  the  spirit ! 

But  in  what  hierarchy,  pray,  of  ideals  are  these  two 
words  to  be  thus  employed,  in  unwise  opposition,  to 
the  glory  of  the  one  and  the  abasement  of  the  other  ? 
An  effective  indication  of  the  essential  want  of  im- 
agination in  the  really  English  mind  is  the  inflexi- 


DEMOCRACY.  157 

bility  of  its  literary  formulas;  its  persistent  regard  for 
idioms  and  moulds  of  thought;  its  inability  to  name 
things  accurately,  which  is  the  only  way  to  secure 
freshness  and  even  distinction,  such  distinction  as  much 
of  even  the  least  conspicuous  of  French  literature 
achieves  to-day;  its  assumption  that  the  intensely 
unusual  is  in  itself  unwarrantable  license,  instead  of 
being,  as  often,  the  scientific  naming  of  not  much 
noticed,  but  after  all  familiar  things.  This  contrast 
between  "  material  "  and  "  things  of  the  spirit "  is  an 
illustration  of  this  habit  of  using  blurred  phraseology. 
But  whereas  the  conservative  religious  forces  may  be 
said  to  have  an  excuse  —  at  all  events  they  may  be 
pardoned  —  for  propagating  so  deceptive  an  error  as 
this  contrast  preserves,  literature  has  none.  Litera- 
ture, criticism,  are  bound  to  be  less  shackled.  They 
should  point  out  that  the  material  activities  of  our 
moment,  those  activities  which  we  mean  when  we  talk 
of  the  progress  of  thought  directed  to  money-getting, 
to  railroad-making,  to  application  of  electricity  in 
torpedo,  in  flying-machine  or  theatrophone,  to  the 
establishment  of  journal  or  of  school,  in  general  to  the 
development  of  all  the  means  of  intercommunication, 
which  bring  to  the  uneducated  the  spurs  and  oppor- 
tunities of  thought,  are  the  very  causes  which  are 
changing  the  lethargy  of  the  Philistine  into  the 
troublesome  curiosity  of  our  aroused  and  democratic 


158  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

earth.  I  have  no  fear  that  that  absorption  of  us  all 
by  the  Philistines  which  Matthew  Arnold  once  an- 
ticipated with  pain  will  ever  come  to  pass.  One  feels 
somewhat  sorry  that  it  will  not,  however,  for  the 
reign  of  the  Philistines  would  be  sure  to  be  a  reign  of 
comparative  peace,  of  evolution,  at  least,  instead  of 
the  revolution  that  we  all  have  so  much  reason  to 
dread.  No,  of  that  there  is  no  danger  —  or  no  hope. 
The  social  evolution  of  the  world  is  now  moving  much 
too  rapidly.  Its  progress  is  in  another  direction.  It 
extinguishes  the  spark  of  life  in  dodoes;  and  the  Phi- 
listine, more  and  more  left  behind,  among  obstreperous 
but  thinking  people,  may  one  day  claim  as  his  last 
distinction  the  preservation  of  his  somewhat  battered, 
but  essentially  unchanged,  type,  appreciable  only  as 
a  survival  of  a  less  interesting  time.  Yet,  as  I  said, 
with  enough  Philistinism  tempered  by  the  devout 
Christianity  of  "  faith, "  we  might  preserve  forever 
the  contented  and  the  happy  life  with  all  the  some- 
what dull  eclat  of  our  admired  ancestors.  So,  if  we 
cannot  any  longer  count  on  the  old  faith  nor  on  a 
Philistinism  submitting  to  be  leavened,  where  is  our 
hope  ?  What  kind  of  solution  is  left  to  us  1 

The  answer  to  this  question  is  the  sort  of  thing 
with  which  any  "  political  science  "  hoping  to  claim 
our  serious  attention,  or  to  deserve  its  name,  is  bound 
to  deal;  but  upon  which  Laveleye,  perhaps  in  his 


DEMOCRACY.  159 

discreet  way,  at  all  events  to  the  diminution  of  the 
importance  of  his  book,  refused  to  enter.  His  admi- 
rable axiom  about  equality  in  political  rights  and  in- 
equality in  social  conditions  indicated,  as  I  said, 
clearly  enough  the  danger;  but  there  he  left  us  with- 
out a  clue.  And  yet  we  see  every  day  about  us  a 
greater  and  greater  gulf  yawning  ominously  between 
present  reality  and  aspiration.  We  have  approxi- 
mately to-day  over  the  w;estern  countries  of  the  earth 
equality  in  political  rights,  but  we  have  apparently 
more  and  more  inequality  in  social  conditions.  The 
lowest  strata  of  the  human  community  are  clearly  far 
better  off,  from  an  absolute  point  of  view,  than  they 
were  in  the  ages  called  Middle.  But  relatively  they 
are  not.  At  all  events  they  think  that  they  are  not. 
The  French  Revolution  has  gone,  with  its  loud  preten- 
sions. But  it  has  left  behind  it  a  great  illusion,  and 
liberte,  egalite,  fraternite,  are  hollow  mockeries  in  the 
ears  of  the  unprivileged,  or  the  less  privileged,  every- 
where. M.  Max  Nordau  says,  in  his  Les  Mensonyes 
Conventionnels  de  la  Civilisation,  "  Equality  is  a 
chimera  hatched  by  the  savant  at  his  desk,  or  by 
dreamers  who  have  never  observed  with  their  own 
eyes  nature  and  humanity.  ...  It  is  a  fable  which 
has  no  further  place  in  a  rational  exegesis,  .  .  .  and 
which  no  longer  figures  on  any  democratic  programme 
save  that  of  a  beer-garden." 


160  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

Well,  all  this  one  will  not  hesitate  to  admit,  but  it 
is  just  in  this  admission  that  I  find  the  only  possible 
premise  of  further  thought.  For  the  gigantic  exertions 
devoted  by  men  to  the  search  for  equality,  whether  it 
be  in  revolt  of  Spartan  helot,  or  of  Koman  slave,  or  of 
meddlesome  bourgeois,  or  of  English  colonist,  or  as  to- 
day is  instanced  everywhere  in  the  rise  of  socialism, 
are  always  the  indications  of  the  effect  of  those  educa- 
tive awakening  laic  forces  which  we  find  supremely 
at  our  moment  so  widely  extending,  so  impossible  to 
overlook.  But  just  so  pervasive  is  this  laic  movement 
in  our  time  that  we  are  bound  to  note  the  immensity 
of  its  cause ;  and  when  we  have  noted  it,  not  to  forget 
that  this  cause  cannot  henceforward  be  excluded  as 
it  could  be  at  a  time  when  there  were  no  penny-posts, 
no  Atlantic  or  Pacific  cables,  no  newspapers,  no  free 
schools,  no  railways,  no  telephones.  And  these  causes 
of  the  laic  unrest,  these  powers  which  are  creating  a 
fresh  man  in  a  new  earth,  which,  in  teaching  all  men 
to  think  and  generalise,  are  making  their  condition  of 
indigence  more  sensible  to  them,  are  so  steadily  being 
multiplied  that,  instead  of  having  seen  the  end  of  a 
slight  and  merely  impudent  insurrection  against  estab- 
lished order,  we  are  assisting  at  what  is  only  the  open- 
ing of  a  most  unpleasant  burst  of  individuality;  and 
this  movement  will  go  on  unceasingly,  with  all  its 
troublesome  vulgarities,  and  with  increasing  roar  as 


DEMOCRACY.  161 

with  the  sound  of  a  whirlwind,  until  the  rich  man  and 
the  scholar,  not  knowing,  with  all  their  coins  and 
learning,  how  to  bribe  or  crush  the  laic  mob,  shall 
draw  up  their  garments  about  them,  intrench  them- 
selves in  their  country-houses  and  cabinets,  and  watch 
the  vain  and  light  fellows  of  the  new  time  sowing 
with  salt  their  fields  and  gardens. 

And  salt  they  will  sow,  depend  upon  it,  for  they 
are  not  Philistines,  and  are  not  very  religious,  unless 
the  inequality  which  they  are  learning  to  resent  in 
social  conditions  be  quickly  annihilated.  Science  is 
upsetting  the  world.  It  has  now  to  reorganise  it.  It 
has  been  experimenting  almost  beyond  human  tole- 
rance. The  chief  mark  of  science  would  seem  to  be 
irony,  which  M.  Kenan  calls  the  consolation  of  the 
just.  Has  it  been  trying  to  see  how  far  it  can  go, 
and  will  it  turn  back  at  the  "  nick-of-time  "  ?  For 
now  it  would  seem  to  be  taking  away  all  the  props 
of  the  social  structure  with  a  kind  of  diabolic  serenity, 
only  to  watch  it  tumble,  crashing  to  the  ground.  It 
might  have  left  us  "  respectable, "  all  of  us  easy-going 
Philistines  and  backbiting  Christians,  but  it  willed 
not.  It  taught  religion  how  to  utilise  its  piety;  it 
furnished  instruments  to  philanthropy  while  we  ap- 
plauded :  but  all  along  its  secret  plan  apparently  was 
only  to  draw  the  attention  of  the  succoured  to  their 
woes.  It  engaged  Englishmen  in  India  to  model  a 
11 


1G2  PATRIOTISM  AND   SCIENCE. 

state  on  well-tried  systems  of  education  and  on  civic 
discipline,  to  teach  the  natives  the  rules  of  self-gov- 
ernment, and  it  is  doing  the  same  in  Egypt  to-day,  and 
to-morrow  it  may  do  the  same  in  Morocco ;  but  all  the 
time  it  has  concealed  the  malevolence  of  its  real  inten- 
tion, —  the  creation  of  an  unruly,  irreconcilable  public 
opinion,  destined  one  day  to  deny  its  parents,  like 
the  thankless  child  of  the  proverb.  It  has  patted 
on  the  back  the  generous  man,  enforced  by  religion; 
acquiesced  in  the  delusions  of  a  pope  when  he  cele- 
brates a  Columbus  as  the  discoverer  of  a  new  world  for 
the  Church;  and  furnished  philanthropic  arguments 
to  the  utterly  mercenary  founders  of  the  great  colonial 
companies  of  the  world;  and  always  and  ever  its  sole 
object  has  been  to  lead  us  on  to  the  very  brink  of  de- 
struction, and  meanwhile,  when  at  this  brink,  to  erect 
the  coquettish  buildings  of  a  vast  fin  de  siecle  fair,1 
decked  in  streamers,  where  ideas  are  sold  as  trinkets, 
and  theories  hawked  to  enticing  cry  for  phenomenal 
cheap  prices.  And  here  we  all  are,  with  chuckling 
science  looking  on.  In  truth,  science  has  a  pretty 
wit. 

Ah,  yes,  but  we  have  not  done  with  science  yet.  It 
is  science,  and  science  only,  that  is  to  find  for  us  the 
solution  to  the  great  question.  Science  has  made 
America  and  Australia,  in  comparison  with  the  stand- 

1  Cf.  La  Foire  aux  Idees,  of  M.  Henri  de  Saussine.   1892. 


DEMOCRACY.  163 

ards  of  older  communities,  vulgar;  it  is  working  a 
similar  change  in  England.  But  in  the  end  science  is 
to  solve  its  problem  by  consistent  application  of  the 
same  series  of  causes  as  hitherto  have  filled  us  with 
dismay.  The  only  hope  for  Democracy  is  that  the 
inequality  of  conditions  shall  be  approximately  so 
quickly  done  away  that  a  feeling  of  reasonable  satisfac- 
tion shall  bring  temporary  tranquillity  to  the  restless 
aspiration  of  the  new  laic  men.  Compare  what  the 
race  has  accomplished  in  the  late  seventy  years  with 
what  it  had  attained  in  ten  thousand  years  before,  and 
the  plausibility  of  this  solution  will  be  irrefutably 
pressing.  But  scientific  development  must  advance, 
not  only  rapidly,  it  must  go  with  a  prodigious  speed. 
If  it  does  not,  it  will  not  order  the  world.  If  it  does 
not,  our  civilisation,  which  in  any  case  is  to  be  utterly 
transformed,  will  be  changed  by  revolution.  Science 
must  learn  to  respond  to  the  myriad  awakened,  awa- 
kening wants,  almost  as  soon  as  they  are  felt.  And 
that  it  will  do  this  is  the  only  hope  now  left  to  us. 

Yes,  our  romantic  moment,  called  by  the  theolo- 
gians material,  by  the  rhymers  prosaic,  by  the  aesthetes 
vulgar,  is  but  the  noisy  close  of  a  somewhat  too  long 
overture  in  the  great  opera  of  our  common  progress, — a 
prelude  marked  in  its  earlier  portions  by  naive  passages 
of  delicious  melody,  later  on  by  symphonic  movements 
stern  and  simple,  with  frequent  lyric  bursts  into  a 


164  PATRIOTISM  AND  SCIENCE. 

larger  air,  and  at  the  close  by  a  superb  but  often  in- 
harmonious mingling  of  melody  and  musical  comment, 
shot  by  leit-motiv  after  leit-motiv  of  the  first  scenes  of 
the  opera  to  come.  But  although  this  overture  which 
we  have  learned  to  love  we  ourselves  cannot  soon 
forget,  the  audience  of  the  next  centuries  will  turn 
upon  it  a  more  scientific  ear.  They  surely  will  be 
amused  at  the  illusion  held  by  many  of  us  that  our 
much-admired  overture  was  all.  But  not  even  their 
lot  is  so  wonderfully  wider.  We  have  no  real  cause 
for  jealousy.  For  when  one  thinks  of  Algol,  the 
wandering  thought  makes  nothing  of  us  all. 
Whether  this  be  consolation  is  another  matter. 


THE    END. 


Messrs.  Roberts  Brothers'  Publications. 

THE  FUTURE  OF  SCIENCE. 

BY  ERNEST   RENAN. 

One  Volume.     Svo.     515  pages.     Cloth.     Price,  $2.50. 


"It  would  be  difficult  to  name  a  man  of  literary  genius  comparable  in  breadth 
and  depth  of  learning,  or  fertility  and  charm  of  expression,  to  M.  Ernest  Renan. 
Certainly  in  all  France  there  is  none  like  him.  The  fact  is  just  as  plain  that  both 
in  and  out  of  France  he  has  been  persistently  misunderstood  by  certain  of  his 
readers,  and  misrepresented  by  those  who  have  not  and  will  not  read  him.  He 
has,  for  instance,  been  called  a  man  without  a  religion,  and  now,  as  though  in 
answer  to  this  statement,  and  by  way  of  refuting  the  commoner  charge  that  levity 
is  the  characteristic  and  habitual  frame  of  mind  in  which  he  lives,  he  has  pub- 
lished a  volume  entitled  'The  Future  of  Science '  (Boston:  Roberts  Brothers), 
wherein  he  sums  up  the  new  faith  which  with  him  has  replaced  '  shattered 
Catholicism.'  .  .  . 

"It  should  not  be  supposed  that  M.  Renan  is  here  seriously  attempting  to 
found  a  new  religion,  or  even  to  formulate  a  new  system  of  philosophy.  We  have 
read  the  volume  rather  as  a  personal  statement  of  the  delights  of  learning  and  of 
productive  scholarship,  and  as  such  it  has  a  distinct  and  rare  value.  Nowhere 
does  it  open  itself  to  a  profitable  criticism  that  would  refuse  to  challenge  the 
veracity  of  the  author."  —  Philadelphia  Press. 

"  Although  Ernest  Renan  wrote  much  of  this  book  many  years  ago  (shortly 
after  he  left  the  Catholic  Church)  it  is  to-day  an  epitome  of  the  most  advanced 
modern  thought.  In  a  style  so  exquisitely  simple  that  we  think  not  of  the  words 
nor  of  the  writer  but  only  of  the  thought,  he  sums  up  what  science  has  done  for 
us  already.  We  are  brought  into  full  view  of  the  idols  it  has  knocked  down.  With 
clear  vision  we  can  Iook~back  and  see  the  long  road  up  which  the  human  race  has 
toiled  ;  our  eyes,  thanks  to  science,  unclouded  by  superstition,  can  study  it.  And 
how  much  man's  position  has  altered  !  He  was  not  especially  created.  He  was 
not  foreordained  to  everlasting  punishment,  nor  elected  to  eternal  bliss.  And 
this  great  change  of  thought,  affecting  the  foundations  of  our  social,  political, 
and  religious  being,  we  owe  to  science.  .  .  . 

Will  science  ever  clear  away  the  rubbish  and  show  us  a  broader,  fairer  land 
than  that  which  has  encouraged  the  toilers  before?  Renan's  book  gives  great 
hope  of  this.  It  is  written  in  a  tone  of  courage  and  cheerfulness  that  is  very  in- 
spiring. He  admits  the  danger  of  the  transition  period,  the  relaxation  of  moral 
strength  with  the  stimulus  removed.  "  Chimeras  have  succeeded  in  obtaining 
from  the  good  gorilla  an  astonishing  moral  effort;  do  away  with  the  chimeras  and 
part  of  the  factitious  energy  they  aroused  will  disappear."  But  when  between  the 
lines  of  this  book  we  can  detect,  as  we  do,  a  spirit  devout,  tender,  upright,  cheer- 
ful, and  serene,  it  seems  that  the  future  state  of  pure  rationalism  which  science 
aims  to  bring  about  would  not  be  incompatible  with  human  goodness  and  happi- 
ness." —  Chicago  Tribune. 


Sold  by  all  Booksellers.     Mailed,  postpaid,  by  the  pub- 
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Messrs.  Roberts  Brothers'  Publications. 

LAOCOON.  An  Essay  upon  the  Limits  of  Painting 
and  Poetry.  With  remarks  illustrative  of  various  points 
in  the  History  of  Ancient  Art.  By  GOTTHOLD  EPHRAIM 
LESSING.  Translated  by  ELLEN  FROTHINGHAM.  i6mo. 
Price  $1.50. 

In  reference  to  this  work,  we  can  give  our  readers  no  better  proof  of  its  merit 
tban  by  quoting  the  words  of  an  English  critic  uttered  many  years  ago  :  "  The 
author  of  the  '  Laocoon'  was  perhaps  the  greatest  critic  of  modem  times.  The 
object  of  this  celebrated  work  is  to  show  that  the  isolation  of  the  several  fine  art! 
from  each  other  is  essential  to  their  perfection,  and  that  their  common  aim  is  the 
production  of  beauty.  The  peculiar  province  of  poetry  is  proved  to  be  entirely  dis- 
tinct both  from  that  of  morality  and  of  philosophy ;  being  limited,  strictly  speaking, 
to  the  exhibition  of  ideal  actions.  These  views,  in  which  Lessing  differed  widely 
from  Klopstock,  who  made  moral  beauty,  and  also  from  Wieland,  who  considered 
nature  and  truth,  as  the  great  aim  of  poetry,  but  in  which  he  agreed  with  Aristotle, 
and  was  closely  followed  in  their  assthetical  theories  by  Goethe,  Schiller,  and  Hum- 
boldt,  were  enforced  with  great  argumentative  power,  extraordinary  purity  and 
correctness  of  taste,  and  with  rich  and  pertinent  illustrations  from  the  art  and 
literature  of  Greece." 

From  the  Boston  Transcript. 

It  is  a  matter  for  real  congratulation  that  Messrs.  Roberts  Brothers  have  given 
us  the  "  Laocoon"  of  Lessing  in  a  form  accessible  to  readers  ignorant  of  German. 
Miss  Frothingham  has  evidently  done  her  work  of  translation  as  a  labor  of  love. 
Her  rendering  is  at  once  accurate,  and  in  pure,  flowing  English ;  an  achievement 
very  difficult  to  accomplish  where  the  whole  grammatical  structure  of  two  languages 
differs  so  widely.  It  is  also  a  feature  of  great  value  toward  the  general  usefulness 
of  the  book  that  she  has  appended  translations  of  the  many  passages  from  Latin 
and  Greek  authors  through  which  Lessing  illustrates  his  argument. 

The  growing  interest  m  our  country  in  questions  of  art  and  criticism  ought  to 
secure  for  this  work  a  wide  class  of  readers.  No  thoughtful  person  ever  torgets 
the  outburst  of  enthusiasm  its  first  reading  awakened  in  him.  Even  Goethe  said 
of  it  that  in  the  confused  period  of  his  own  youth  it  cleared  up  the  whole  heavens 
to  him  and  made  his  path  plain  before  him.  As  an  oifset  to  such  books  as  those 
of  Ruskin,  marvellously  rich  and  suggestive,  but  full  of  subjective  caprice  and  dog- 
matism, it  teaches  invaluable  lessons  of  method.  Lessing  was  a  legislator  in  the 
domain  of  criticism.  His  insight  was  so  nearly  unerring,  and  his  knowledge  so 
vast  and  accurate,  that  his  verdicts  stand  like  those  of  a  Mansfield  or  Marshall  in 
the  courts  of  law. 

.  .  .  The  book  must  be  read  and  re-read.  It  created  an  epoch  in  art  criticism 
when  it  first  appeared,  and  its  lessons  are  as  fresh  and  weighty  to-day  as  ever.  On 
evsry  page  great  principles  are  developed  which  help  one  to  an  ever  deeper  appre- 
ciation of  the  works  of  the  great  masters  in  art  and  literature. 


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MR.   HAMERTOWS   WORKS. 


FRENCH   AND    ENGLISH:    A  COMPARISON.     Square  i2mo. 

Price  $2.00. 

"  Mr.  Hamerton's  comparison  of  the  two  nations  follows  a  very  methodical  order.  H« 
compares  them,  step  by  step,  in  reference  to  education,  patriotism,  politics,  religion,  virtues, 
customs,  and  society.  The  chapters  on  the  virtues  —  which  are  philosophically  classified 
under  the  heads  of  truth,  justice,  purity,  temperance,  thrift,  cleanliness,  and  courage  — 
abound  in  suggestive  observations."  —  Academy. 

"  A  most  interesting  and  instructive  work.  Mr.  Hamerton  has  lived  long  in  France  ;  and 
he  is  not  only  a  close  observer,  but  a  thinker.  .  .  .  Like  everything  that  comes  from  his  pen, 
this  work  is  distinguished  by  a  literary  style  of  remarkable  clearness  and  grace,  while  in  sub- 
stance it  is  equally  distinguished  by  the  sound  basis  of  its  criticisms  in  experience  and  their 
general  impartiality."  —  The  Scotsman. 

"  As  its  title  indicates,  it  is  in  the  nature  of  a  comparison  ;  but  while  its  plan  accommodates 
itself  to  this  indication,  it  makes  no  attempt  to  do  so  stiffly.  On  the  contrary,  its  treatment 
is  delightfully  free  and  easy.  The  scope  of  the  work  may  be  gathered  from  the  fact  that  the 
comparison  of  the  two  peoples  refers  to  their  education,  patriotism,  politics,  religion,  virtues, 
custom,  society,  success,  and  variety,  — this  last  implying  their  diversity  as  peoples,  that  is, 
the  degrees  in  which  portions  of  them  vary  from  the  common  type.  But  this  enumeration 
utterly  fails  to  give  any  adequate  idea  of  the  intimate  knowledge,  the  multiplicity  of  details, 
the  shret  'd  observation  of  a  multitude  of  matters,  and  the  kindly  criticism  of  a  thousand 
points,  which  have  contributed  to  make  this  a  most  readable  book.  The  subject  of  the  volume 
is  intrinsically  interesting,  but  it  is  rendered  additionally  so  by  the  graceful  and  easy  method  of 
its  presentation  There  is  everywhere  evidence  of  the  author's  extensive  knowledge  of  litera- 
ture, and  his  close  observation  of  men,  institutions,  and  manners.  At  the  same  time,  the 
topics  which  come  within  his  range  are  of  the  highest  importance,  and  such  as  are  now  attracting 
the  widest  attention.  There  is  not  a  dull  statement  nor  an  uninstructive  observation  in  the 
book,  and  in  it  Mr.  Hamerton  has  made  a  valuable  addition  to  the  volumes  on  kindred 
subjects  with  which  he  has  already  delighted  readers." — Exchange. 

PARIS.     In  Old  and  Present  Times.     Profusely  illustrated  with 

woodcut   engravings  and  12  superb  full-page   etchings.     4to.     $6.50,     Library 
Edition  with  all  the  woodcuts.     8vo.     $3.00. 

"  It  is  neither  a  history  of,  nor  a  guide-book  to,  the  gay  and  giddy  French  capital,  although 
it  partakes  in  some  degree  of  the  nature  of  both;  but  it  is  a  very  pleasant,  instructive  volume, 
brimful  of  information  about  the  famous  buildings,  parks,  squares,  and  places  of  Paris,  which 
those  who  have  seen  them,  as  well  as  those  who  have  not,  will  be  glad  to  have  described  by 
pen  and  pencil  in  so  attractive  and  convenient  a  manner.  .  .  .  He  invites  his  readers  to 
accompany  him  in  a  lazy  boat-ride  around  the  city  ;  and  during  the  progress  of  this  journey, 
he  points  out  the  different  historic  buildings  to  be  seen  from  the  water,  tells  the  story  con- 
nected with  them,  explains  their  architectural  details,  and  secures  the  excellent  engravings 
which  beautify  his  book.  .  .  .  He  traces  with  historic  accuracy  the  erection,  decoration,  decay, 
and  restoration  of  those  magnificent  temples.  The  parks  and  gardens  and  the  streets  are 
treated  in  separate  chapters,  particular  attention  being  paid  to  landscape  effects,  drainage, 
paving,  etc.  The  book  is  written  in  a  graceful  and  spirited  style ;  it  is  handsomely  bound 
and  printed,  copiously  and  artistically  illustrated,  and  cannot  fail  to  be  a  useful  and  instructive, 
as  well  as  ornamental,  addition  to  the  library."  —  Saturday  Evening  Gazette. 

"Paris  is  so  rich  in  historical  association,  so  full  of  important  buildings,  so  carefully 
planned  and  arranged,  so  brilliantly  decorated,  and  so  perfectly  cared  for  and  kept  up  —  in 
short,  is  so  clearly  the  nearest  approach  yet  made  to  the  idea,  city,  —  that  one  is  never  weary  of 
reading  about  it.  Mr.  Hamerton  knows  his  Paris  well,  her  history  and  her  aspect,  without 
being  so  narrow  in  his  exclusive  devotion  as  the  pure  Paris-lover  gets  to  be  ;  and  he  is  a  very 
observant  and  sagacious  judge  of  architectural  effects,  even  if  a  little  too  catholic.  The  book 
is  in  nearly  all  respects  just  what  that  fortunate  person  needs  who  means  to  reside  in  Paris  a 
while,  with  leisure  to  study  it ;  it  can  hardly  fail  to  give  him  generally  sound  notions  of  what 
the  famous  city  has  that  is  most  admirable  in  its  external  aspects."  —  N.  Y.  Evening  Post. 


MR.   HAMERTOWS   WORKS. 


MODERN  FRENCHMEN.     Five  Biographies :   Victor  Jacque 

mont,  Traveller  and  Naturalist ;  Henri  Perrevve,  Ecclesiastic  and  Orator ;  Frangoii 
Rude,  Sculptor ;  Jean  Jacques  Ampere,  Historian,  Archaeologist,  and  Traveller, 
Henri  Regnault,  Painter  and  Patriot.  By  PHILIP  GILBERT  HAMERTON.  Uni 
form  with  "  The  Intellectual  Life,"  &c.  Square  i2mo.  Price  $2.00. 

"  Philip  Gilbert  Hamerton  has  the  faculty  (not  common  to  all  authors)  of  making  every 
thing  he  touches  interesting.  Best  known  as  a  writer  on  art,  his  works  upon  that  subject  havi 
come  to  be  recognized  as  standards.  His  novels  and  essays  are  always  full  of  meat,  and  hi 
works  generally  are  characterized  by  a  fairness  and  impartiality  which  give  them  peculi?. 
value.  His  latest  work,  'Modern  Frenchmen,'  is  made  up  of  five  biographies."  —  Boston 
Transcript. 

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human  nature  to  deal  with,  —  those  eternally  interesting  creatures,  men  and  women.  •  . 
Occasionally,  too,  there  are  sentences  that  suggest  by  their  felicity  the  rhythm  of  poetry.  Bette 
than  all,  in  this,  as  in  every  one  of  Mr.  Hamerton's  works,  we  feel  that  we  are  dealing  wit] 
a  man  who,  besides  his  grace,  his  wit,  or  his  keen  observation,  is  always  on  the  side  of  simpl 
truth  and  purity  of  living,  and  possesses  a  high-minded  faith  in  the  power  of  the  Best,  and  ; 
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LANDSCAPE.     Square  i2mo.     Price  $2.00. 

"  Mr.  Hamerton  in  sending  to  his  publishers,  Messrs.  Roberts  Brothers,  a  complete  set  c 
proofs  for  the  library  edition,  says;  '  I  have  done  all  in  my  power  to  make  "Landscape"  ; 
readable  book.  It  is  not  mere  letter-press  to  illustrations,  or  anything  of  the  kind,  but  a  bcol 
which,  I  hope,  anybody  who  takes  any  interest  in  landscape  would  be  glad  to  possess.'  .  . 
The  subject  is  treated  from  all  sides  which  have  any  contact  with  art  or  sentiment,  —  from  thi 
side  of  our  illusions  ;  our  love  for  nature  ;  the  power  of  nature  over  us  ;  nature  as  subjective 
verbal  description,  '  word-painting  ; '  nature  as  reflected  by  Homer,  as  the  type  of  Greel 
'  1  or  Latin,  Ariosto  or  Medieval ;  then  as  studied  by  Wordswortl 

_ Jr English  and  French  ;  from  its  relation  to  the  various  graphic  arts 

its  characteristics  in  Great  Britain  and  in  France,  and  from  the  geography  ol  beauty  and  arl 

»oks,  rivulets,  and  rivers  in  l" 


nature-impression  ;  by  Virgil  or  Latin,  Ariosto  or 
and  Lamartine,  as  types  of  English  and  French  ; 

its  characteristics  in  Great  Britain  and  in  France, „    „    .   .. 

Mountains  are  weighed  in  the  art  balances  ;  lakes,  brooks,  rivulets,  and  rivers  in  their  degree 
of  magnitude.  Then  man's  work  on  rivers  and  their  use  in  art  are  considered ;  then  trees 
under  their  various  aspects  ;  then  the  effect  of  agriculture  on  landscape,  of  figures  and  animals 
and  of  architecture.  '  The  two  immensities,'  sea  and  sky.  conclude."  —  The  Nation. 


Mr.  Hamerton's  Works  (not  including  "  Etchers  and  Etching,' 
"Imagination  in  Landscape  Painting,"  "Paris,"  and  "A  Summei 
Voyage  on  the  Saone  ")  may  be  had  in  uniform  binding.  14  vols 
Square  I2mo.  Cloth,  price  $28.00;  half  calf,  price  $56.00.  A 
cheaper  edition  14  vols.,  i6mo,  cloth,  Oxford  style,  $17.50;  cloth, 
imitation  half  calf,  $21.00. 
For  sale  by  all  booksellers.  Mailed,  post-paid,  on  receipt  of  adver* 

tised  price,  by 

ROBERTS   BROTHERS,    PUBLISHERS, 

Boston^ 


14  DAY  USE 

TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORR<™"< 


